War may be hell, but it doesn't stop developers attempting to make it a fun and exciting experience that the whole family can enjoy.
Such is the case with Epic Little War Game, a relatively simple turn-based strategy game with a cast of cute characters and over-the-top violence.
But its attempts at charming the player are just a mask for an ultimately shallow experience with a poor tutorial and a lack of any real entertainment value.
Oscar Mike
Epic Little War Game has you doing battle on a hex-grid across a range of battlefields, typically with the aim of blowing up your opponent's base.
There's a wealth of infantry units, ground vehicles, and air vehicles to deploy, each with their own advantages and disadvantages that you'll need to be aware of if you're going to survive.
The game's single-player campaign does a pretty decent job of slowly introducing you to each of these units, as well as offering variety with different objective types.
One mission will have you preventing supply trucks from reaching a location for a certain number of turns, while the next will have you destroying a strategic building to make your final assault easier.
What it lacks is any kind of tutorial – while the "tap to select" controls aren't difficult to work out, every other detail is hidden behind tips that take up an inordinate amount of space on the screen until you open them.
SNAFU
The lack of a good tutorial, which actually shows you how to play the game, means you spend the first few missions convinced you're doing something wrong.
There's very little you can get wrong, however. The main tactic is to build up an army of overwhelming force, usually with a vast number of snipers, which can one-hit-kill any infantry unit it sets its sights on.
Snipers are in fact so effective that you'll only use other units as a human shield to prevent the computer from killing them straight away – usually with its own small squadron of snipers that it spawns each turn.
But depth and high strategy isn't what the game is really about – it is called Epic Little War Game after all – and as a short blast of turn-based strategy it actually just about works.
It knows that it's fairly silly and throwaway fun – though the less said about its attempts at humour the better – and if you're not looking for anything too in-depth and serious than you'll probably enjoy it.
Bugging out
All in all, Epic Little War Game isn't going to change your life, but it should stand to keep you busy on a dull afternoon.
It starts off a little clumsy with a lack of a solid tutorial, and it never really explores its own depths, but it also doesn't really want to.
It's simple, clean fun for those who want to kill a couple of hours blowing tiny men into huge chunks of gore in a turn-based world, and you can't knock it for that.