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'Epic Citadel' comes to Android today, but 'Infinity Blade' will stay an iOS exclusive

'Epic Citadel' comes to Android today, but 'Infinity Blade' will stay an iOS exclusive

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Epic Citadel
Epic Citadel

The Epic Citadel iOS tech demo may be over two years old, but it's still a beautiful example of the graphical detail Unreal Engine 3 can produce. Now, Epic is releasing Epic Citadel for Android devices, but there's more behind the move than simply releasing a pretty but ultimately limited app. Epic is hoping the work it put into this release will help protect game developers against Android fragmentation while simultaneously making it easier for those devs to target the Android platform. An Epic spokesperson told us the following in a statement:

Epic has now shipped an Unreal Engine app for Android, which means we’ve invested in plenty of QA testing against a wide range of devices, and we’ve executed the necessary profiling required for shipping Android games, etc. This means that any developer licensing the Unreal Engine for Android benefits from that process – all the work we do gets rolled back into the engine and shared with our licensees.The company hopes the QA testing and profiling it did to bring Epic Citadel to Android will help developers better utilize Unreal Engine 3 when building games. Additionally, those games should work on a wider range of devices, thus making the investment in the Android platform more likely to pay off. And while Epic Citadel was first released back in August of 2010, the Unreal Engine 3 powering it still produces some of the best-looking games around, including the Infinity Blade series on iOS.

Unfortunately, Epic also let us know that there are no plans to bring the Infinity Blade franchise to Android, despite the recent work it has done on Unreal Engine 3. The franchise will remain an iOS exclusive, Epic told us. As for the new Epic Citadel demo, the company added a new benchmarking mode to gather more performance data across the wide variety of Android devices out there — it'll let users test framerate, quality, and resolution for their device. It may not be Infinity Blade, but hopefully the work that Epic has done here will help more games of that caliber make their way to the Android platform.