Edge of Tomorrow: Live. Die. Repeat Review

The movie Edge of Tomorrow is a lot like a video game. Focusing on repeating a day until the hero, William Cage, succeeds and gets everything right; it's essentially like repeating a level of Mario, keen to get everything pitch perfect. It's an interesting concept and one that the film mostly succeeds at capturing. Its iOS based tie-in game, however, does not succeed. It's monotonous and lacking significant content to be particularly worthy of merit.

The game is solely focused on the beach battle within Edge of Tomorrow - a pivotal part of the film. Players start at one end and have to make their way to the waypoint. Die and, predictably, the game simply takes one back a short way to a checkpoint and they start again without any penalty. It's a mechanic that makes sense given the film's concept, but in a game it proves quite tedious.

Soon enough, negotiating that beach turns into a matter of attrition. There's no real threat to dying other than feeling frustrated at having to wait for the game to display 'Live, die, repeat' and then go back to the earlier checkpoint. Instead, it's just quite dull.

Movement is reasonably accurate with drags of the finger dictating where Cage goes, but shooting is less comfortable. It's conducted automatically when the reticule is hovering over an enemy, even if it's hovering over an enemy which happens to be behind a wall. That sometimes means a lot of wasted bullets, which is very unfortunate given there's no way of manually reloading. It's even more infuriating when one has equipped a rocket launcher, which often has quite limited ammunition.

A tips bar suggests that action is different every day, which sounds promising, but in reality, Edge of Tomorrow: Live. Die. Repeat. never changes from day to day, and instead sticks to this one format at all times. With no weapon upgrades or unlocks, a five minute play shows exactly what to expect two hours later.

Ultimately, Edge of Tomorrow: Live. Die. Repeat. just isn't as interesting as it should be, despite some attractive visuals. It does grab the key concept of the film reasonably well, but it turns out that doesn't relate to an enjoyable game.