Developed by Cinemax, Gyro13 – Steam Copter Arcade HD is a fully featured, physics-based helicopter arcade game for iOS that has earned critical acclaim. In Gyro13, players use fine skill and control to navigate cavernous mines, save stranded miners and evade heavy mechanical obstacles.
Lauded for its excellent visuals and addictive missions, Gyro13 has received many great reviews.
The App Shack rates Gyro13 a 10 out of 10. “It’s incredibly immersive, has amazing graphics, superb animations, intelligent level design, great music, top notch physics matched with outstanding controls, and, of course, awesome gameplay.”
Touch Arcade gives it a 4.5 out of 5 stars, noting in its round-up of the best iOS games of September 2011, “The graphics and sound are great, and the skill requirement makes completing objectives feel like a major accomplishment.”
AppCraver gives Gyro13 an A+ for gameplay and calls it “a must buy,” saying “it’s every bit fun with gameplay as it is interesting to look at with smooth and stunning graphics.”
Lukáš Macura, CEO of Cinemax, elaborated on why his team chose to develop Gyro13 with UDK, the free edition of Unreal Engine 3.
“We have always considered the Unreal Engine to be one of the best AAA engines available, so when UDK came out and we found that it suited all our needs perfectly, we saw no reason to look anywhere else. For us, the choice was obvious.”
Macura said that no other licensable technology can match UDK’s optimization or its mature, sophisticated toolset.
“We've worked extensively with Unreal Matinee and, of course, with Unreal Content Browser, which are both excellent toolsets and keep getting even better,” he said.
“However, the toolset we found to be truly amazing is Unreal Kismet, which is extremely easy to use yet powerful. It is great for both everyday development and fast prototyping. It's so accessible to total newcomers that we were even able to publish a 10-part article on starting development with UDK on a premium Czech IT website, which quickly became very popular.”
Macura also noted that, as Unreal Engine 3 is a very feature-rich game engine, his team was initially concerned with how long it would take to create a tech demo for Gyro13. “Fortunately, we were pleasantly surprised with how fast we were able to have our game prototype running,” he said.
As for support, Macura emphasized the value of the UDK community and the Unreal Developer Network (UDN).
“The community is great and very helpful, especially the Trendy Entertainment guys (creators of Dungeon Defenders).” Macura concluded, “It would definitely take us much longer to get where we are right now without the knowledge shared through UDN.”