I’ve always been a fan of strategy games, especially turn based games. As fun as an RTS can be I often prefer the more relaxed tactical game play of turn based fare. More chess style tactics and less zerg rushing. Your forced to use more thought in your choices and far less twitch. As I’ve been searching for more quality games for my iPhone I came across a great little turn based sci-fi strategy game called Uniwar.
The game is obviously heavily inspired by the RTS classic Starcraft. You have three distinct groups at war on an alien world; the human Sapians, the insect like Khraleans, and the cybernetic Titans. Each race has seven units covering all the basic areas or infantry, armor, artillery, and air support and many of the units have special context specific abilities such as the Khralean infantry who have a tunnel ability or the Titan basic unit who can teleport. Learning these abilities and the bonus and weaknesses they place upon a unit makes for an added layer of depth.
The game is a sprite based affair played on hex grid maps. All the units look very distinct with common themes across the races to make it easy to distinguish units at a glance. They all have simple animations to give the battles a little more sense of life. Such animations also play on specific terrain grids, specifically the bases grids. The rest of the terrain grids all use fairly basic artistic depictions of different terrain types from deserts, to forest land, to water. The style of the game is very similar to games like the Advanced War series that has appeared on Nintendo’s Gameboy and DS systems. Though not pushing the graphically boundaries of the genre or the processing power of the iPhone the game still looks great and is very polished.
Like the graphical style the game also shares many elements of its actual control system and game play with the Advanced Wars series. Each turn the player can move any of their units, with different terrain types effect the speed a unit can move over them as well as offering different levels of cover and defense. The game follows the paper-rock-scissors philosophy of combat which helps keep things balanced. It’s a much slower paced style of play then an RTS, more like a complicated chess match. Along with the single player campaign the game also includes single player quick play, online multiplayer, and a pass the phone multiplayer mode which gives the game lots of playing options.
If you’re a fan of turn based strategy games and own an iPhone I definitely recommend the game. It’s a blast to play, with fairly high production value and a very reasonable price at only ninety-nine cents. So far it’s by far the best turn based game I’ve found for the system and it’s given me hours of fun so far.