Take Cover review - A strategy game you've seen a hundred times before
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Army fatigues are specifically designed for soldiers to blend into their environments so that they won't stand out, draw attention, and potentially alert people to their presence.

Games featuring soldiers also seem to follow a similar pattern, because after a while, every single one of them looks exactly the same.

Take the aptly-named Take Cover, for example – yet another in a long list of strategy games that sees you building bases, shooting baddies, and all that other gubbins you've done a hundred times before.

Keep your head down

Your time will be divided between going out and fighting enemies in short action levels, and building up your base to help you out in these sequences.

The battles are the most interesting part, since they offer up at least a small amount of novelty within the genre.

You have to choose a small number of units to take into battle with you, including what cover you want to deploy when you're out there, and then you're dumped into the battlefield.

The basic gist is that you have to get from one end of a grid to another, with a few enemies in the way to spice things up.

You have to effectively place down cover, move your soldiers into said cover, and slowly work your way across the battlefield, destroying everyone as you go.

Except that every enemy is hooked up to a battery, which is destroyed in one grenade blast, a special move your basic soldiers can do with only a short break between each throw.

Cover me

So it really becomes a puzzle game, where you determine the fastest route to each battery with your units without losing too many in the process.

Dropping your own cover is cool, and some of the levels are genuinely challenging, but overall they're just not that exciting.

The same can be said for the base building aspect of the game, which is just like every other base builder you've ever played. You build structures to access new units, and upgrade them to upgrade your units.

The only new addition here is that you'll have to build a new piece of cover every time you deploy one, meaning you're stuck waiting in your base between missions while cover gets built.

Deja vu all over again

It's a tried-and-tested set of mechanics, and while Take Cover isn't exactly a bad game, it's by no means anything to write home about.

Some of the action levels can be quite fun, and the cover system isn't something you encounter much in mobile strategy games, so it gains points for originality there.

But the rest of the game feels exactly the same as every one of the other dime-a-dozen strategy games on the App Store.

If you're really stuck for a strategy game to play, give it a look. Otherwise, you can probably do better elsewhere.

Take Cover review - A strategy game you've seen a hundred times before

As tired as the soldiers it represents, Take Cover is the same strategy game you've played before, with little to set it apart from the rest
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Ric Cowley
Ric Cowley
Ric was somehow the Editor of Pocket Gamer, having started out as an intern in 2015. He hopes to take over the world the same way.