Infinity Blade II Interview

If you’re into the iOS-powered RPG scene, then you’ll be interested in knowing that the guys at Slide To Play chatted up ChAIR Entertainment’s Donald Mustard earlier today about the ambitious Infinity Blade sequel they’ll be releasing next month. An excerpt, as usual:

What new features and gameplay mechanics have been added in Infinity Blade 2?

There’s some really cool new gameplay elements in Infinity Blade 2. One of the ones I’m most excited about is the ability to have different weapon styles, and have different play styles with your weapon choices. In the first game, you had your sword and shield, and you could block, dodge, and parry. That was kind of the core gameplay. But now we’ve expanded it out and allowed you to equip different styles of weapons.

There are three different classes of options. You still have your sword and shield as an option to choose, but you can also dual-wield, so you can equip these dual weapons that allow you to strike much faster and do stab moves, and unlock some very huge combo chains that are only available in that class. And because you have these two swords, you don’t have a shield, so you can’t block. So when you’ve selected that style of play, instead of a block button, you have a third dodge button now that allows you to duck under attacks. So this is a much quicker, more acrobatic style of play, which has some cool strategic things that you can do, depending on your enemy or your style of play.

We also now have heavy weapons, like big axes or big maces that you’ll hold with two hands, these big heavy weapons that slow you down a bit. So now you can’t dodge using that class, so you have to rely on parrying or directional blocking, where you can block to the left or block to the right and really read the attacks that are coming. But, in doing so, it opens up the enemies for these mega-damage swipe chains that you can unleash on them. So these three styles add a lot of depth to the swordplay and the strategic way that you’re interfacing with the battles.

In addition to that, we’ve also added the ability to customize all of your gear. There are these elemental gems dropping all through the world, that you can find in treasure chests, that you can buy in the store, that you get from enemies, that allow you to socket them into different items in the game and imbue them with all different kinds of abilities. Everything from elemental damage and big stat boosts, to unique stuff that will change your scratch hits to drop gold instead of damaging the enemies. All sorts of things like that, that make it a more custom experience.