Great Little War Game

Summary

Great Little War Game (GLWG)—the game’s name says it all: it is a strategy game set against a bloody war backdrop. But is the game really all that ‘great’. We decided to take a closer look, play a few rounds and share our verdict with you in today’s review.

Test device: Motorola Defy with CM7.1

The premise of Great Little War Game is following an odd-ball of a general’s orders: either defeat enemies, ward off invadors (for a certain amount of time) or help the weirdo general escape.

Different types of troupes have to be recruited to assigned recruitment buildings:

• Infantry
• Vehicles
• Boats
• Air force

There are only two air force units, all of the others consist of six units, which makes 20 units in total. Most units are armed and out to destroy enemy troupes.
There are also a few transport units whose job it is to get the troupes to where they are going, and fast.

One of the more central GLWG characters is the engineer, whose role it is to suss out neutral as well as enemy building that are plotted out on the map. It’s very important to protect one’s buildings against enemy engineers, occupy as many neutral buildings as possible at the beginning of a game, as well as throw enemy recruiting buildings or headquarters under siege. This all falls in the engineer’s field of expertise, which makes him especially vulnerable to enemy attacks.

A map consists of lots of fields positioned at different on higher and lower grounds. A foot soldier can cover four fields and one change of level in a round. Units positioned higher up have an advantage over those units below.

Recruiting buildings have one field planted along one side, and this is where new soldiers will pop up. There’s also an infirmary field where injured soldiers go to recover and get treatment. However, solders don’t just appear out of the thin air: money to recruit them is obtained from the oil refineries. Refineries – like all other buildings – cannot be built from scratch; the engineer has to acquire them, though you do start off with one or twoat the beginning of each level.

There’s an offline multiplayer mode during which you have to swap devices with your opponent.

Bottom line:
Great Little War Game is a very entertaining strategy game with lots of tactics elements. The gameplay itself is cool, as are the different settings, the multifaceted design and fluid animations. The enemy AI may not be wizards when it comes to strategy, but make worthy opponents nonetheless.
What I didn’t like quite as much is how the game starts off: players are thrown right into a round without help or explanations, and it all seems somewhat confusing and disorienting at first. That said, once you get over this initial drawback the game is very well made and will keep you hooked for hours.

Great Little War Game comes in a look that’s somewhat reminiscent of cartoons and comics strips. Maps therefore all bear resemblance, even though the settings are wildly different: a rainforest, a lake district, a tundra.

The game is animated extensively, so you can enjoy watching the water foam, the leaves of the forest and every camera movement is fluid and affords gamers a better perspective of their environment. All this is somewhat contingent on the graphics settings, though.

Controls are brilliant, and I was somewhat reminded of playing a board game.
 

Great Little War Game made its Market debut around one month ago, which probably explains why the app crashed as often as it did. Said crashes lucky never resulted in the premature termination of a level.

The app’s speed is fine. Effects settings can be adapted according to how powerful a phone you have.
 

Great Little War Game is available for 2.16€ from the Android Market. To my mind that’s quite a fair price for such a wicked (in every sense of the word) game.