10tons recently released a great new take on the line-drawing genre with Boom Brigade [$0.99].
Rather than managing flight paths or other vehicular trajectories, Boom Brigade uses the line drawing mechanism to control your soldiers in defending your base from invading enemies. In some ways, the game feels a bit like a real time tower defense.
The game offers you three differently armed soldiers to choose from: Minigun, Shotgun, and Bazooka. Each type has slightly different stats. The Minigun soldier has the least damage power, medium range/movement but the most health. Meanhile, the Bazooka soldier has lots of damage power, long range, but low health and slow movement. Gameplay involves drawing paths to for your solders who automatically fire at incoming enemies. Each weapon has a reload time so it’s not a constant barrage of fire, and the invading enemies will start chasing the soldiers as they get close. As a result, the best strategy is to create a circular path around the enemies to corral them together to make most of your firepower.
Money, health and extra soldier (rare) powerups appear and can be collected. Money can then be used to buy weapon upgrades and base repairs. The game is over when the enemies overtake your base.
As much as I like the concept and mechanic of this game, I should warn you the game gets rather hard rather quickly as the enemy numbers increase. Once you are managing 3 soldiers at once, it can get very hard to multi-task properly. And once you lose a soldier, it’s unlikely that you’ll survive much longer. Upgrades are also hard to come by, and ultimately, this level of difficulty could be discouraging to new players. Also, I feel the game likely does suffer from the rather small size of the iPhone’s screen, as the your maneuverability is rather limited given the available real estate.
The developer video shows the game in action:
Boom Brigade is a fresh new take on the line-drawing mechanic, and offers a very interesting but also very challenging game.
App Store Link: Boom Brigade, $0.99
