I enter another gore-streaked room. The door seals behind me and alarms blare while a voice on the PA system declares that a “hazardous anomaly” has been detected. Within seconds I’m surrounded on all sides. While I carefully plan out each shot to dismember the undead monstrosities that are quickly closing in on me a single thought enters my mind: “this is just like the Xbox 360 game!”

Few, if any, other offerings have delivered on the full potential of mobile gaming the way IronMonkey’s Dead Space did. It provided an experience nearly identical to that of which you can find on home consoles with only minor cutbacks. Perhaps it was a bit unrealistic, maybe even unreasonable, to expect the same thing from their follow up for the Mass Effect franchise. Because rather than a miniature RPG available on the go, what we got is a Gears of War-style third-person cover shooter. One that, while impressive for the hardware, fails to live up to the quality of the rest of the brand.

There are hints of the moral decision making that define its bigger siblings and will lead to a couple different endings. Almost exclusively in the form of choosing to execute that random NPC you stumbled across in a side room or not. I played through this twice to see both outcomes (as well as try out each control scheme). Neither is terribly satisfying, and oddly enough the renegade one feels like the more merciful of the two, but that’s because there’s not much going on here narratively at all. Somewhat wasting the great voice acting and sound design.

As for the action, I was surprised by how well the touchscreen controls work, encountering solely slight quibbles with weapon swapping and using biotic abilities. Level design is rather mediocre (but looks great!) and it wasn’t until I got enough credits to buy some new guns, upgrades, and biotics that battles went from being pretty dull to moderately amusing, but the arcade-esque ranking system which challenges you to use your entire arsenal so as to not kill foes in the same way more than once in a row adds a bit of life to the mix and there’s one really cool boss here.

It helps to make for a title I could see myself playing in a waiting room for a brainless distraction or something, but can’t really say is worth fans of the series going through the effort to uncover. Especially since it’s hard to find a working .apk with the necessary data that doesn’t still say it requires an additional download from a server that (understandably) appears to not be active anymore. IronMonkey definitely put on another display of technological wizardry, but even back in its day the biggest reason to play this was that completing it would grant you a few supplementary assets to help boost your “Galactic Readiness” score in ME 3, which naturally isn’t an exciting prospect anymore. Still, despite being a totally skippable side entry for the property I would rather go back to paying roughly 7 bucks for stuff like this than continue shoveling through the constant array of greedy, cookie-cutter “F2P” crap that act as the norm nowadays.

6/10

What is the point of a Mass Effect game? I always thought it was role-playing with the emphasis on the story. Sure, they all have combat systems, but those always felt secondary, as they were never anything more than a generic cover shooter. But Infiltrator is simply a generic cover shooter, and not even a good one.

The controls are clunky, the AI is braindead, the level design is linear. There's a tacked-on ranking system that has no reason to be here. You can't even point-shoot.

The graphics are technically impressive, but aesthetically sterile. The game looks almost like a Unity asset flip.

Honestly, the only reason I'm giving it 1.5 stars is because it's a mobile game, so I'm cutting it some slack. But there's really no reason to play this.