Free iOS FPS The Drowning hits App Store
Two fingers, one hand.
The Drowning, the iOS freemium first-person shooter you can play with two fingers, has released on the App Store.
The post-apocalyptic shooter is out for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. An Android version is expected to launch at a later date.
The Drowning was created by DeNA's Scattered Entertainment studio in Sweden, with development headed up by former Battlefield producer Ben Cousins.
In an interview with Eurogamer published last year, Cousins said the story will last about ten hours or so, but it will take hundreds of hours to unlock and level up all of the weapons.
Scattered Entertainment has created a system that means The Drowning is playable with just two fingers on one hand. Rather than use virtual sticks, it uses the standard gestures used to navigate apps on, for example, an iPad.
You shoot by tapping the screen with two fingers, with the bullet fired to the centre-point. This means you're able to shoot any pixel on screen without having to move a camera and line-up a crosshair.
Cousins called it a "highly accurate and fast" shooting mechanic. "You can pop headshots off guys who are a really long way away, and that's something that's almost impossible to do with a virtual stick," he said.
To look around you swipe the screen. To move you tap the location in the world you want to move to and the game takes care of the rest, using an intelligent path-finding system that moves the player character around the objects in your way.
Cousins said this one-handed control system lets players do anything they can do in a console or PC shooter, "and in some respects it's better than playing with a controller because we've got more accurate shooting and faster aiming".
