Great Big War Game Review (iPad) - GamersDailyNews

Great Big War Game is a top-down, turn-based strategy war title that offers a good long single player campaign with a lot of maps and options, but still, some weird damage flaws.

Great Big War Game offers multiple modes of play including:

• Campaign - fight through a planned warfare campaign. Each battle has a particular objective to be completed.
• Skirmish - Special maps with specific objectives in one-off scenarios against the AI.
• Pass & Play - Two person local multiplayer where each takes their turn then passes the iPad to the next.
• Online - Asynchronously played online games against other players.

The maps for Great Big War Game are overlaid with circles to denote movement and range and some maps will have differing elevations which are taken into account for sight and attack range as well as defense. There's also a fog of war when you haven't got any units that can see into an area or are nearby.

There is a sort of rock-paper-scissors mentality to Great Big War Game where some units are far better against others and have almost zero defense to attacks from certain units. This makes for some weird damage results where a bazooka can take out a tank in one shot, but a tank cannot take out a bazookateer in one shot even though a tank shell would surely have enough power to kill. The terrain itself also isn't taken into account for battle, only for movement and sight. Some ships which should be able to attack land units as well as air units, like the destroyer, are not able to do so. I know they can as I was stationed on one when I was in the Navy. Each set of units, air, land and sea, seems to have been designed so that you have to build multiple units in order to fight different kinds of units. While it's part of the strategy, it jerks one out of the gameplay from time to time.

The units that you can use are based on the amount of resources you've managed to gather and what level you're on. There are multiple infantry units (rifle, grenadier, bazookateer, sniper, engineer and technician), multiple land vehicles (jeep, supply, tank, missile launcher, artillery) and air and naval units as well (further along in the game). But you're limited by what is available. For example, if there's no airbase or shipyard, you can't build one to then get those units. Also, naval units can't attack land but artillery can attack naval, which is a bit odd.

The graphics in Great Big War Game, since it's top down, aren't amazing. More on the level with a Wii title I guess though they do look good on the Retina display. The sounds in the game are good as well though the music does get repetitive, luckily, it, the voices and the sound effects can all be controlled separately.

Overall, even with the weird damage rules, or rather, the counter-intuitive damage rules, Great Big War Game is pretty cool and fun. It's certainly challenging until you get a firm grip on all the units and plan your strategy wisely.

Review based on full retail version supplied by developer for free.