Splinter Cell designer unveils biggest ever mobile game

Back in May we had Doom maker Jon Romero waxing lyrical about his love for mobile. Then Tetsuya Mizuguchi – the designer genius behind Lumines – caught the bug.

Now Pascal Luban, the key man behind the innovative multiplayer mechanics in console hit Splinter Cell – Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory, has revealed his first phone game, The One Hope. And he's bringing some new ideas to the table.

It's a truism that technology is nothing without creativity to harness it. For instance, it was clear for some time that making wholly digital movies was a far more efficient, cost-effective and even higher-quality method than using old-fashioned film. Yet it was only when the likes of Jackson, Lucas and Tarantino started championing it that digital really began to take off.

A similar thing now seems to slowly be happening in mobile games, with leading console game innovators like Romero and Luban bringing their talents to the smaller screen, and so adding to the growing credibility of the format.

At first glance, Luban's debut looks pretty ordinary. The One Hope is a turn-based role-playing adventure game in which you play an unlikely hero from the peaceful land of Asteria who has to explore the perilous monster-packed underworld of Vahalla in order to recover precious meteor shards.

There are 15 levels to explore in the main game, and all the usual enemies to defeat, items to collect and gold to loot. The levels can be explored in a free-form fashion too, once the game has been completed.

So far, so familiar fantasy fare. However where The One Hope could distance itself from the pack is in the multiplayer features.

For starters, the game enables you to hook up with a friend and explore its levels co-operatively. More intriguing though is the ability to exchange gold you've collected for construction blocks and monsters, with which you can design and construct your very own dungeon.

When you're satisfied with your lair, you can upload it to a central server and enable other players to explore it with the aim of stealing your gold. If they succeed they gain your stash, but if they fail they must forfeit the same amount to your coffers.

It certainly sounds an interesting blend of gambling and gaming, and we look forward to trying it out in practice.

And with all this packed into a mobile game, it's no great surprise that Gmedia is claiming The One Hope will be the biggest mobile game to date, although to be fair the claim of 800Kb (most java games are 2-300Kb) is specific to the Japanese release, and not the one available here.

Does bigger mean better? We'll find out shortly, as the game launched in the UK this week, exclusively on the 3 network.

Oh and there's also a Nintendo DS version in the works, so pop back for more news on that as well as the mobile review – just as soon as the builders have finished the extension to our dungeon.