iClone review

Mark Mackay

We review iClone, a character tracker and handy tool for CCP’s epic multiplayer game, Eve Online

Published on Oct 20, 2009

Eve Online has to be one of the biggest and most complicated massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) ever made.

Unlike many other games in its genre, characters are developed in real time. This gives a great advantage to players with endless online time on their hands, such as students or the unemployed, being unable to grind their characters far in advance of their peers who have a life.

The downside, however, is that when a character completes a skill, you need to know about it in order to set a new one training.

Thankfully, iClone is at hand to help you out. A common problem with these apps seems to be getting your characters onto them as you need to provide your API key. Being a random alpha-numeric string that’s about two billions characters long, inputting it manually is a royal pain in the starship.

On the accounts screen, the app says that it can add an Eve account to iClone via your iPhone address book if you add the app name in the organisation field. We couldn’t get this to work though so had to do input it manually.

Once this is done the app provides all the character info you need to know. iClone displays the skill that’s training, how long left until it’s finished, the date and time it finishes and your current quantity of skill points.

In addition to this you can also see your implants and current attribute levels such as memory or willpower.

Along the bottom there are buttons to show corporation, player owned structure (POS) or assets information from all of your characters. However, only the corporation feature would work for us at this stage, which may be due to the app being an early rendition.

The ‘More’ menu at the right-hand side provides a multitude of features with which to play. There’s an item browser that provides details on what appears to be every item in the game, from control towers to exotic dancers.

Perhaps more useful though is the jump planner, which can plan a route for your carrier, black ops or jump freighter to run across New Eden.

This will be of particular use to anyone not running a dual display rig as you won't have to alt tab into a browser or other app to plan one out.

iClone appears to be somewhat wet behind the ears, and it’s also free, so some allowances have to me made for any functionality issues. You can set updates to occur automatically though so if you download it then you could check its progress from time to time.

For now though, the character tracker and jump planner work a treat. iCLone is worth a shot if you’re looking for an New Eden Swiss army knife.