Wargame is a turn-based strategy game that puts you in control of any one of six factions, with the main task of conquering the world. If you’re a fan of this genre then you’ll probably appreciate the gameplay. However, this is not going to be something anyone else will be interested in playing.
The game lets you choose to be the leader of the U.S.A, Soviet, European Federation, The Great Reich, The Great Khalifa and Empire of the Sun. The only customization here is your ability to change the leader’s name to your own, or anything you’d like to be called. Your next option is to select what you’d like your main objective to be. You can be ambitious and set out to conquer the world, or you can just defeat everyone within your own continent. This option really allows you to play the way you’d like to play. You don’t always have to set out to conquer every single country.
The idea is to move your troops from your home country into neutral and enemy territories to take them over. If you have more troops and more powerful weapons, then you’ll win the battle. If you don’t, you’ll either lose troops or your entire country. When you run out of troops and weapons, you’ll need to purchase more. All of these decisions can be made in a single turn, and will be queued up to accomplish one task or a set of tasks at one time.
There are two areas of buttons that control gameplay. If you tap on one of your countries, a side menu will appear with several options. You can tap on the movement button to move your troops into one of your own countries to better defend it, or you can move them into an enemy country to attack it. When attacking, all you will see are the two country symbols and which one takes over the other to win the battle. Audio of gunfire will accompany the attack, but that’s all. There are no battle animations of any kind, just sound. This isn’t very exciting if you ask me. Other options in the side bar include the ability to buy more troops, build defenses and look over information about your country. One great part about this game is the detail that went into it to make things more realistic. For example, when you move troops overseas, you must utilize ships for transfer. Each ship can only carry so many troops, so you’ll need to budget wisely to make sure you have purchased enough ships to transfer enough soldiers to win the battle.
The other options panel is located at the bottom of the screen. Here, you can check to see if you’ve won any medals, initiate special projects such as the Manhattan Project and spy on enemy countries. The bottom left corner will always show the button to skip your turn when you are finished queuing up orders. These buttons are all positioned well and are of descent size for easy control. You can also pan around the map with one finger and zoom in or out with two.
The first problem I had while playing the game was selecting countries to attack. While zoomed out, it was difficult to select a country, forcing me to zoom in first in order to really tap on the correct part. Another issue I had with the game is that you can’t see the number of troops you have in your country without actually tapping on one and hitting the info button. Each country will display this information in a bar graph at all times, but if you are zoomed out, you can’t really see it and it still doesn’t show exact numbers. It would be nice if you could quickly know the precise troop count in each country. Also, you don’t get any notifications of what has been built, or how much money you have gained after each turn. You have to tap on buttons to get this information. Instead, a brief summary of what happened during that turn should appear on screen. Lastly, my biggest gripe is the lack of animations. War games, be them strategy or action, should have some animations of planes flying, troops marching and ships traveling across the ocean. These animations add to the sense of realism while playing. This game is overly simple with regards to graphics, animations and overall layout. All the menus are just black and white, making the game seem very dated. The main menu screen is the nicest looking part in this application, and that just shouldn’t be so.
Overall, Wargame is a basic war strategy game that is only minimally entertaining. There are others out there that are more intuitive, and simply more fun. The only thing this game has going for it is the integration of multiplayer, allowing up to six players on one device, or connected through wifi. However, even with this multiplayer feature, I do not recommend purchasing this application.
