Infinity Blade II has been on the App Store for a few months now, but there's been something lingering even further off in the distance: ClashMob. We first heard about this intriguing feature shortly after the game was announced alongside the iPhone 4S last fall, with developer Chair Entertainment promising that it would add a new kind of social gaming functionality to the gorgeous hack-and-slash affair. It's finally available today, alongside a small stack of other improvements.
What ClashMob adds to the experience is the ability to tackle brief, quick-hit missions that the many thousands of other Infinity Blade II players will have access to, with all of your cumulative progress going towards the same goal. Case in point: one of the three active missions (as of this writing) is to deal 1,000,000,000 damage points to a monstrous beast over the span of 24 hours. Each player has one shot at it and only about 25 seconds in which to do the damage; you'll be lucky if you take a few thousand points off of his tally. But if many thousands of players all do the same within that span, we'll topple the beast and unlock a sweet sword just for us participants.
It's all about shared effort and shared reward, with new missions cycling through all the time. Another active mission right now tasks 60,000 players with each killing just one titan within a short span of time, while another gives you about 10 seconds to tap gold bags that appear on the screen. It's clear that these ClashMob missions are only meant to occupy a few total minutes of your time each day, but if you stick with them and come back regularly, you might find yourself with a nice selection of rare weapons and items. And it helps to recruit your friends -- the more Game Center friends you have playing ClashMob missions, the more time you'll have to play each mission, or you'll pick up some extra cash as a reward. You do have to login with your Facebook account to use ClashMob, though, which could be a drag to some players.
Beyond ClashMob, the latest free update to Infinity Blade II on iPad and iPhone adds a Gem Forge feature that lets players create powerful gems, along with more than two dozen news items and weapons to accumulate, plus a light visual upgrade to take advantage of the new iPad's Retina display. And the app promises an extended single-player campaign in a future update, so any chance of this excellent iOS exclusive losing its grip on fans seems terribly unlikely.
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