Over the years I've had a strong love/hate relationship with the Infinity Blade series. It has been by turns, a highly rewarding, premium game experience and also a very disappointing one. My issues with the IB series go back to my experience with the very first Infinity Blade, which at one point refused to even open (using an iPhone 4 and iPad 2 at the time) for over six months (in fact, I was never able to resolve that issue before I moved on to IB II), to the present day’s scandal. The game series, for all of its amazing gameplay, strong storyline, and stellar graphics, seems to have been plagued with consistently recurring development problems, bugs, and glitches. But this latest fiasco takes the cake...
If you haven't heard the news, Infinity Blade III ($2.99 on sale) recently issued a disastrously buggy update just before the holidays. Unknowingly, I wrote about what exciting news this was, please forgive me if I inadvertently contributed to the loss of all of your saved game data. Within days of the update, the game's rating dropped from five stars to three and the reviews were consistently expressing frustration that this new, highly vaunted update had erased the saved game data of thousands of players, myself included.
Apparently the folks at ChAIR felt a little sorry for the folks who lost all that money spent on in-app purchases and all that time grinding away to level-up, and offered a very brief window of opportunity to make an easy 15 million credits, theoretically leveling the playing field and making up for the catastrophic data loss, but that was a very short-lived offer and as was the case for me, I can't even play the game any more as it freezes up in the opening God King battle and wouldn't even allow me to win the 15 million credits if I tried.
Now the special offer is over, I still can't play one of my favorite and most expensive games (using my iPad mini; interestingly enough my iPhone never experienced a data loss in the game, but who want to play Infinity Blade III on a tiny iPhone if they don't have to?!) and there seems to be nothing I can do about it.
I can't say other games haven't given me troubles, they certainly have. I can't play Real Racing 3 or Call of Duty: Strike Team with any reliability on my iPad mini either. So obviously Epic Games isn't the only game publisher pushing out glitchy software, but honestly I expected more from this company.
To me it seems preposterous that this would happen with one of the most popular iOS games ever, a game that has consistently been used to show off the gaming potential of iOS at Apple's media events. And yet, with a track record of buggy software, why am I not surprised? We've reached out to Epic Games for comment, but as of yet, we haven't gotten any response. We’d love to hear your experience of the Infinity Blade III game, and any glitches you've experienced with it, in the comments below.