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Imagine you discovered an amazing new food, and the first thing you tried to do was put it between two slices of white bread. Or what if you were handed a remarkable new musical instrument, and your immediate reaction was to see if you could make it sound like a guitar?That's the frankly weird impulse behind the ongoing, quixotic quest to make first-person shooters work on touchscreens. A new technology that demands accumulated decades of input dogma be thrown out, inviting completely new ways to play, and some people apparently can't wait to make it do the same thing as every other gaming device. Such is the big selling point of The Drowning, a glossy touchscreen first-person shooter that claims to have come up with the answer to a question that didn't need to be asked.
The storyline is thin enough that you can safely skip it. Gloopy zombie-like creatures emerge from an oily sea and lay waste to the Earth. Handful of survivors... last stand.. .blah blah blah. What matters is that you can shoot these monsters in the face, just like you can on the PC or Xbox. Or at least, a little bit like you can on those platforms. The Drowning has to tinker with the guts of the genre to make it work without a joypad or mouse but, credit where it's due, the system that developer Scattered Entertainment has come up with is about as close as we're likely to get to something that works through touch alone.
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