A third-person shooter built from PS2-era polygons and a hip-hop soundtrack shouldn't hit as hard as this one does. El Paso, Elsewhere does anyway. It's a slow-motion neo-noir shooter for iPhone that hunts vampires, werewolves, and fallen angels down through a motel that runs 46 floors beneath the city, from Strange Scaffold, the studio behind I Am Your Beast.
The combat is open Max Payne worship: dive sideways into bullet-time, empty two pistols on the way down, throw a holy-fire Molotov, land, repeat. Each floor is a level, and the descent doubles as the story, James Savage chasing Draculae, the vampire lord he used to love, narrated over RJ Lake and Xalavier Nelson Jr.'s score. Between firefights it slows down: a beaten muscle car parked in the desert, a tiny lit elevator sinking through a chasm of writhing shadows. The PS1-grain look is a choice, not a budget.
On console and PC in 2023 it earned the reviews, an 82 on Metacritic for the Xbox version, an OpenCritic recommendation north of 80 percent, and indie nominations at the DICE and New York Game Awards. Digital Trends called its Game Awards omission a snub. The iPhone port carries the writing and the slow-mo intact; what it fights is the glass. App Store reviewers flag cramped touch controls, lag that creeps in around chapter four on older devices, and controller support that works but stops short of full remapping.
The story and the gunplay survive the jump to a phone. The touch controls don't, quite.
iPhoners on an iPad or a paired controller get the closest thing to the version reviewers fell for. On a phone, thumbs crowding a 6-inch screen, it's that same game wrestling its own buttons, and at nearly 3 GB it's a real download to find out which camp you land in.
