Infinity Blade

Infinity Blade reduced combat action to a series of taps and finger swipes – blocking, dodging, and attacking are controlled with gestures directly on the enemy's body, while the camera stays in a fixed cinematic shot resembling an interactive film more than a classic game. Between fights, the player collects weapons and armor and, through a cycle of defeats, strengthens the character in order to push a little further into a cursed castle full of guardians.

Chair Entertainment released the game in 2010 as one of the first showcases of what the Unreal Engine could do on mobile hardware – detailed character models, dynamic lighting, and cinematic camera angles were an absolute rarity on phones at the time. The game served simultaneously as a technology demo for Epic Games and as a full-fledged title with its own, albeit simple, story about an endless cycle of death and rebirth of the same character.

The simplicity of the controls – no virtual sticks, just gestures on the screen – made Infinity Blade one of the most accessible action games on touch devices, playable even without prior experience with the genre. The cycle of repeated dying and returning to the castle stronger, which at first feels like a punishment, gradually became the core game loop and gave the title unexpected depth despite its simple controls. The game and its sequels were later pulled from the App Store, so new players can no longer buy it and are limited to older devices where it remained installed from before.

Why play it: Interesting mainly for those who have access to an old device with the game already downloaded – as a showcase of how far mobile game graphics could go, though it's no longer readily available to new players today.