A perilous journey.

Rather than dropping you into a wholly fictional realm, Parallel Kingdom wanders off the beaten RPG path. It plots your physical location in space with Google Maps then overlays it with a host of monsters, items, and adventurers. Using the touchscreen, you guide your avatar around the few square miles of your town, picking up spare armor and weapons to do battle with roving wolf packs, stag herds, and the occasional troll. As you move to different real-world locales the overlay changes, dynamically.

Melding real-world data with a virtual game is no easy task, and Parallel Kingdom sometimes loses its way. The game doesn't use locative data from Google very effectively. Your local map essentially serves as an irrelevant canvas where physical structures like lakes, roads, and parks don't inhibit an avatar's movement or correlate to the type of creatures that spawn. Parallel Kingdom also suffers from frequent crashes, which pull you out of the game and often lead to an untimely death, as your avatar can be killed in-game after logout.

When the game's poor stability wasn't getting us eaten by wolves, we noticed some interesting enemy behaviors and game mechanics. Wolves tend to hunt in packs, stag herds scatter when provoked, and your health regenerates when you rest under pine trees. What ultimately leads the game in circles, though, is its lack of customization and social framework. Every character is displayed as an ubiquitous smiley face without common RPG attributes like strength or constitution. While you can message other players in-game and see them on the map, the communication system provides only a scant framework to coordinate attacks and share loot. We wanted more team collaboration and to make real-world friends.

Parallel Kingdom is one of the first in an undoubtedly long line of location-aware iPhone games. The title is a first, noble step in a very long journey, but the game provides only enough of a bread trail to pass the time when you're otherwise bored

Parallel Kingdom strips down RPG gameplay to your own neighborhood, but its spotty use of locative data and poor social networking disappoint.

Parallel Kingdom
COMPANY:  PerBlue
CONTACT: www.perblue.com
PRICE: Free
REQUIREMENTS: iPhone or iPod touch with 2.0 software update.
Location-based maps. Fun enemy behaviors. Chat functionality.
Stability issues. Limited RPG elements. Randomly generated overlay doesn't recognize real obstacles.