Review: Don't get yourself too hot and bothered by Warpack Grunts
Developed by Freeverse and Strange Flavour Limited, Warpack Grunts is a third person army combat game in which you travel around in a pack of 4 special forces units and your job is to blow the enemy to smithereens. The pack moves as one group, and drag your army around by swiping your finger in the direction you want to go. Unlike most iPhone real-time strategy games (which this is not, but RTS games are the best point of comparison for the controls), you cannot select a portion of your units, and you do not tap to move them in a certain direction. Instead, you literally slide your finger in front of where you want them to go, and the screen and units move accordingly. This maneuver has a surprisingly shallow learning curve, and I picked it up within five minutes of gameplay. Your units each have their own machine gun, but share one “special weapon” such as a grenade, bazooka or sniper. You tap in the direction you want to fire the machine gun, or can toggle the special weapon to fire it.
But the worst part of this game was the design. I loved the actual crux of the gameplay, and think that it would be easy for Freeverse to do a second take on the game, raise the price to $4 and make me extremely satisfied with purchasing it. Aside from the aforementioned controls, another major gripe I had was the inability to save. After dying four (or maybe five; I can’t count) times in one go, you are basically back to square one. It doesn’t save at the last mission you played, and so you are stuck starting over from the tutorial levels and ripping hair out reading the same stale dialogue over and over again.
Despite its many flaws, but I would still recommend buying Warpack Grunts if this the type if game you’re into. I was more frustrated about the game because of how much potential it had than anything else, but at $1, I find it hard to believe you couldn’t justify the purchase. That’s one less trip to the vending machine for a game that has major upside if you can look past its pitfalls. Each mission has its own merits, and I found myself glued to the screen while I was ‘nading tanks or gunning down enemy soldiers.
What we like:
- The Missions. Though there were definitely outliers, most of the missions were quick and dirty. Plenty of action and they didn’t last so long that you lost interest.
- The Grenades. Ok, I know this is specific, but grenades are actually a huge part of the game, and their use is extremely well-done.
- Multiple aspect support. Switching between portrait and landscape is essential to the game, and it was a treat to see a game utilize both.
What we don’t like:
- The controls. We’ve mentioned this already, but OMFG was I annoyed at having to drag my finger around like a flippin’ drunkard trying to navigate around the landscape to actually kill the enemies. Also, I thought that toggling the special weapons was too difficult and poorly designed.
- You can’t save. There are over 30 levels in this game, but if you want to play it campaign-style and go through them, you have to start from the beginning after every 4 deaths. Why a bonafide game manufacturer would put its users through that torture (the first few levels are tutorials) is beyond me.
- Only one good special weapon The grenades were fun, yes. But the rest of the special weapons were lame. The sniper and binoculars were too hard to control, and virtually unusable. And the bazooka shot straight at the ground you tapped on, meaning you could only fire at what you saw on the screen. That meant you had to basically stand in front of enemy tank bearing down at you as you frantically fired your bazooka at it, hoping for the best.