Infinity Blade II, a very good game that just launched on iTunes today, is getting rave reviews from people who can get the game to run and is being pilloried for a bug that keeps crashing the game on some iPads.
A solution is coming.
"We've discovered an issue with some users who are running Infinity Blade II on iPad 1 and iPod touch devices," a spokesperson for the game's development studio, Chair Entertainment, said today. "We are working to have a fix for this issue ASAP."
The issue causes the $7 game to crash when its title screen loads. It happened on my first-generation iPad, which is running iOS 5.0.1. It's crashing on the iPads of people who responded to me about the issue on Twitter. And it's crashing for a quite a few people who have submitted user reviews to iTunes:
At the time of this writing, Infinity Blade II is the top-grossing paid app on iTunes. It has 860 five-star user reviews. Most of the 46 one-star reviews are about the crash problem.
In the world of iOS gaming where apps can be updated swiftly and repeatedly, game-crushing bugs aren't forever. The Chair rep said that the game was running on first-gen iPads while in development. Hopefully it will again soon.
While Infinity Blade II kept crashing on my original iPad, it has run fine for me on an iPad 2 and an iPhone 4. Its listing on iTunes indicates that it is supposed to be compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod Touch (3rd gen), iPod Touch (4th gen), and iPad, any of which need to run iOS 3.2 or later. Chair tells me they'll be able to provide more details on how this will be addressed soon. I've also reached out to Apple to clarify how they verify app compatibility across various devices and OSes. This story will be updated if they respond.
The botom line, for now, is to take caution if you're running an iPad 1 or iPod Touch. The rest of you can enjoy the game. I'm slashing through it on my phone.
UPDATE: Mark Rein, VP of Chair's parent company, Epic Games, posted the following to the official Infinity Blade II forums. I must note that his suggested fixes did not remedy the issue on my iPad:
Folks,
For some users Infinity Blade II seems to be running out of memory on their heavily laden iPad1 and iPod Touch devices.
For example if you have a large number of apps installed iOS must cache all those icons to give you smooth performance when you hit the home button. Unfortunately the machines we tested on didn't have massive numbers of apps installed on them so we think this how we think we missed this particular condition.
We're working on a quick fix and will submit an update to the store as soon as possible.
In the meantime we're going to update the description in the iTunes App Store to mention that we're aware of this issue.
One more thing. When apps run of memory at loading time that is something that is often fixed by restarting your device. So I recommend that people try restarting their device to see if that solves it for them. I say this because the game runs fine on my iPad1 which I restarted before playing the game.
Here's how Apple recommends you properly restart an iOS devices: First turn the device off by pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button until a red slider appears. Slide your finger across the slider and the device will turn off after a few moments. Next, turn it on by pressing and holding the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple logo appears then wait for it to continue booting up.
For those experiencing the issue we thank you for your patience!