Gameloft’s BackStab shivers our iPhone 4’s timbers

Whenever a Gameloft title hits the iPhone I play a little game before the game: I try and guess what popular console game it's trying to mimic.

Backstab Delivers Buggy Free-Running, Cannon-Play and Piracy The game play starts off pretty straight forward. Backstab Delivers Buggy Free-Running, Cannon-Play and PiracyInitially the game feels like a third-person hack and slash game, with players tapping away at that sword icon to dispense enemy Spaniards and pirates. Later you discover that Blake can free-run through the city, dashing from rooftop to rooftop, dangling from decorative walls, leaping across narrow, plummeting drops. 

It turns out what I thought was going to be a straight run through a mediocre screen-tapping action game was actually the beginning of a journey through a surprisingly deep, surprisingly interactive world. There are problems: Camera angles go crazy some times. Controlling Blake, especially as he dashes across roofs, isn't always precise enough to prevent some head-splitting drops. At $7, Backstab is relatively pricey, but it's also relatively epic in scale. 

Gameloft’s pirate-tastic BackStab has weighed anchor in the iTunes App Store. Oooh arrr missus.

It both looks and plays a lot like Gameloft’s reworking of Assassin’s Creed for mobiles, featuring rooftop leaping, sword swinging and button mashing action.

Henry Blake also has the ability to run up and scale walls (again, a la Assassin’s Creed) and evade foes by leaping across rooftops.

It’s a rare treat to play a mobile game that offers such as sense of scope and adventure, but BackStab seems to pull this off effortlessly.

Despite BackStab debuting on the Xperia Play - an Android phone - we’ve yet to see BackStab arriving in the Android Market.