Warpack Grunts from Freeverse has the potential to be an amazing arcade style game, but misses on a few key aspects.
You control a squad of four Grunts as they traverse through 40 levels of jungle warfare. This game has 4 levels of difficulty. Easy, medium, hard, and Nnnnnaarrrgh! Seriously, that is the name of the hardest difficulty. This game has a unique sense of humor to it, according to the game the the goal is to fight your way through a generic South American jungle against badly trained evil chaps to defeat the bad guy, Evil Dude.
As you play through the levels, you can collect secondary weapons such as grenades, bazookas and even sniper rifles to use in conjunction with your assault rifle. In later levels you will even use tanks and helicopters to accomplish your missions.
There is fun to be had with this game, but the controls really get in the way. To move your squad you tap on the screen and hold the grunts will move to that location. You can then drag your finger around and the they will follow. The problem with this implementation is that your finger is constantly blocking the screen. The other problem with the controls is that each time you double tap to fire, your Grunts come to a complete stop and become sitting ducks. At first this is really frustrating and the game would be more fun if you could move and shoot at the same time, but trying to look on the bright side of the controls it does force you to play with more of a tactical style instead of just running in and fighting.
The backgrounds and level design are nice and the graphics are fitting to the game type. The explosions are probably my favorite part of this game. They are very well done and look better than any other aspect.
The sounds in the game are high quality and I liked the heroic feel to the music. Adding to the humor of the game, the Grunts were given high pitched voices. This works well with the feel of the game and it is funny to hear their chipmunk voices yelling in the middle of a firefight. There is a pretty big audio glitch in the game though. If you adjust your volume during the game as soon as a level is passed or your squad is killed it will revert back to where it was before. This is a pretty annoying bug which is only avoidable by turning your audio off completely.
All in all, I really wanted to like the game. I do like the characters, voices, and the idea behind the gameplay, but the difficult controls make it hard to wanna pick up and play.
For those of you who are okay with this control scheme, or if the controls ever get updated, with the number of mission and the addition of an un-lockable zombie defense game, there is enough gameplay and entertainment to make this game worth the low asking price. So, keep you eye on this one.
