It's easy to look at Epoch in action and think it's trying to be Gears of War for the iPhone. Easy, and thankfully, wrong.
While the game is a shooter (of sorts), and is built around the idea of juggling between shooting at enemies popping out from cover and taking cover yourself, its controls are elegantly simple, built specifically for the platform.
It's not a full 3D game. You're not running around stages freely. It's a glorified Duck Hunt, in that sense, as you have no say in how far into a level you traverse, or where you take up position when the bad guys show up.
But it's not static. The game is controlled by swiping the screen, and these gestures do everything from dropping you into cover to rolling between cover to vaulting across the screen to avoid grenades.
You can see this in action in the video to the left. I love it. It's not enough control so as to leave you stuck with the bane of iPhone games, a virtual joystick, but it's enough to leave you feeling in control, especially when the pattern of enemy attacks turns your motions into an explosive game of rhythm action.
What then kicks Epoch up a notch is, in addition to the addictively simple gunplay, it looks gorgeous. The game is running on Epic's mobile version of the Unreal Engine, and on an iPhone with a retina display looks almost as good as something you'd play on an Xbox 360.
You can grab Epoch for $6 at the link below.
Epoch [Apple App Store]
You can contact Luke Plunkett, the author of this post, at plunkett@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.