Epic Citadel tech demo now available on Android

Epic Citadel, Epic Games' tech demo of the Unreal Engine for mobile devices, is now available on Android devices, the company announced yesterday.

Epic debuted Epic Citadel during an Apple event in September 2010 to show off the capabilities of Unreal Engine 3 on iOS, as a precursor to the launch of the original Infinity Blade on the platform in December of that year.

While Android users can now get a taste of the Infinity Blade world in Epic Citadel, an Epic representative told Polygon that the Infinity Blade games themselves will remain exclusive to iOS. The spokesperson also said that Epic has no other Android announcements, such as Android support for the Unreal Development Kit, to make at this time.

The Android version of Epic Citadel — which the company said "has been an ongoing effort for some time" — serves another purpose aside from being a pretty tech demo. According to Epic, the company built Epic Citadel on Android in order to encourage and facilitate the development of Android games using the Unreal Engine.

"Shipping [Epic Citadel] on Android improves Unreal Engine support for the platform, thereby benefitting licensees," the Epic representative explained. "We put the engine through the paces it takes to ship Android games. This effort gets rolled back up into the code we share with developers who license the engine."

Epic Citadel on Android also includes a benchmark mode that allows users to measure a device's ability to run the tech demo, in order to obtain information about the frame rate, visual quality and resolution. That will prove useful to developers looking to test a game's performance across the unending variety of Android devices on the market. According to Epic, Android developers have "responded really well to the new benchmarking mode."

Epic Citadel is available to download on Google Play and in the Amazon Appstore. Epic also updated the iOS version of Epic Citadel yesterday to add support for the iPhone 5, fifth-generation iPod touch and fourth-generation iPad.