République, the recently revealed debut title from ex-Kojima Productions and 343i designer Ryan Payton’s new studio Camouflaj, takes a refreshingly different approach to game design than the usual iOS fare. Rather than going for an ersatz 8- or 16-bit spirit or trying to cram a complex genre like first-person shooters onto a platform with a buttonless interface, Republique instead takes a page from the PlayStation era to take advantage of the processing power inherent in Apple’s iDevices while respecting the actual design of the machines it’ll be running on. The graphical style at work here hearkens back to the likes of the 32-bit Resident Evils and Final Fantasies: Detailed polygonal characters and objects exist within pre-rendered environments, static despite having been animated to simulate liveliness, depth, and interactivity.
