Epic Citadel, the Gorgeous 3D iPhone Tech Demo, is Free in the App Store

Remember yesterday, when Apple brought out a couple guys from Epic Games to show off some new hotness on the iPhone. Now you can see it up close. Epic Citadel the open-world portion of the demonstration at Apple’s mostly iPod-centric event, is available free for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

There isn’t anything to do in this demo but walk around the medieval village and survey the countryside. You can’t walk over ledges or jump over obstacles, and the whole thing is neatly penned into a confined area, though Epic’s done a good job of stretching the landscape beyond where you can actually go. Also, the sword-fighting game Epic demonstrated, codenamed Project Sword, is not part of this package. You’ll have to wait until the holiday season for that.

But Epic Citadel certainly shows some promise for iPhone and iPad gaming. I particularly liked the control scheme, which in addition to having virtual analog sticks, lets you tap on any location to run there on auto-pilot, letting you swipe back and forth to look around as you move. For Epic, the challenge will lie in populating this world without taking a huge hit in runtime, but I doubt they’d set such a close release date for the actual game if they didn’t think it could be done. [via iTunes, thanks Rob!]