Boom Brigade

There's an argument in game design circles that you can improve a genre by adding more guns. Finnish developer 10tons has taken this to heart when it comes to the growing iPhone line drawing sector. The result is colourful, cartoon-like, topdown shooter Boom Brigade.

Your goal is to draw out the routes of various well-armed soldiers who are protecting a bunker from increasingly numerous waves of alien scum.

It's an intuitive set-up: your troops rotating and firing automatically whenever a target comes into range, which leaves you to guide their paths. You can directly target individual aliens by tapping on them, too.

Your primary goal is to keep your soldiers alive, which means out of reach of alien claws and mandibles, all while guarding the bunker.

The aliens prefer to follow your soldiers should they be in close proximity, otherwise they head straight for the bunker. As such, the paths you draw can be fairly sophisticated in terms of protecting the bunker while using the troops as fast-moving bait.

Still, as is the way with such games, the final result is always the death of your soldiers and the destruction of the bunker.

Your enjoyment in the process is enabled by a rank, a high score, and a tally of the number of aliens killed. Killing aliens will also result in health picks-ups and cash, which can be used to reinforce your bunker or upgrade your troops.

You can't directly buy more troops, however. You're rewarded instead with the choice of additional units at various points in the game. They come in minigun, shotgun or bazooka flavours, each of which has different damage, range, movement and health attributes. Personally I didn't much like the bazooka guys because they didn't feel so useful against the more numerous swarms.

At most though, you end up with three troops to control. This also seems to be the limit in terms of how many units you can easily control without losing track of them in the melee; something that will result in their quick death whenever they're static for a couple of seconds.

The biggest issue with Boom Brigade, though, is lack of variation. Alien waves follow the same progression each time you play and once you've decided on your style of play, there seems little reason to vary it.

It would have been nice to be able try out some different maps, as well as less predictable alien waves. Online social features are also missing from Boom Brigade version 1.0. Along with these additions, and story-driven missions, stationary guns, and more alien breeds, are promised in future updates.

While it seems churlish to complain about their absence in a 99c game, this aside, Boom Brigade still feels like it hasn't yet fulfilled its potential.

Time for a reload.