Game Reviews

Little Conquest

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iOS
| Little Conquest
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Little Conquest
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iOS
| Little Conquest

Some say that strength in numbers is the best way to win a war. The technical military term for this is, 'choke them with our dead'.

That's the basis of Little Conquest, a strategy game that's heavy on numbers but light on pretty much everything else.

The premise is simple: produce as many soldiers as you can, and then send them to buildings in order to conquer them. Conquering means victory, and victories are always celebrated on the graves of footsoldiers.

Safety in numbers

Set in two distinct time lines, Little Conquest is a game hacked clean of anything even vaguely superfluous. Two armies face off across a field populated by various different dwellings. Each dwelling creates different styles of unit at different rates.

It's your job to take over all of the buildings on a map, using the warriors that somehow magically grow inside them to smash down the doors of your opponent's barracks and murder all of his pawns.

You can choose to send half or two thirds of the regiment in a building onto its next skirmish, tapping on a building and watching your troops sally forth. If more of your soldiers make it to the building than are ensconced within its walls, you win a glorious victory, and your flag is raised.

Obviously, sometimes you'll need to send multiple units, or think carefully about the right time to strike, but the key to victory is always overwhelming your enemy before he gets the chance to do the same to you.

Magic spells and upgrades change the way the game plays, letting you produce more units and protect or attack buildings. Special units can turn the tide of battle too, but more often than not you'll just be spamming out grunts.

Fighting game

Multiplayer bouts all too quickly descend into house-tapping battles of attrition, as swarms of warriors spill out of different abodes. Mistakes are rarely punished, because in the time it takes you to realise that your opponent has made one he's regained enough manpower to beat you into the same stalemate as before.

There's some variation in the single-player, with missions tasking you to defend buildings rather than conquer them, but the game never manages to make you feel like a general. All you're doing is watching numbers, trying to pick the moment that things are balanced in your favour.

Little Conquest plays more like a bean-counter than a war game, and its occasional flurries of entertaining strategic violence aren't frequent enough to overwhelm the boredom.

Little Conquest

Too simple for its own good, Little Conquest strips away too much of what makes strategy games exciting, and leaves you with a repetitive, dull slog
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.