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Chaos Reborn: Adventures review - "The best turn-based strategy game for mobile?"

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Chaos Reborn: Adventures review - "The best turn-based strategy game for mobile?"

Chaos Reborn: Adventures is a game that refuses, wholeheartedly, to be anything other than what it is. From the outset, this is a deep and involving strategy game that's going to punish your mistakes and reward you for smart thinking.

It's definitely not the sort of game you can jump into unprepared, because it'll happily chew you up and spit you out if you do. Instead you need to feel your way through the mechanics, finding purchase where you can, to get familiar with what's going on here.

There are no punches pulled, and if you're the sort of person that loves an angry, challenging, well put together tactical experience, then you're going to love everything it does.

Wizarding world

The game casts you as a wizard. You're playing on a 3D battle map that's split up into hexes. Along the bottom of the screen is a deck of cards, which represents the spells and creatures you can call to your aid.

You've only got a small amount of mana though, so you can't chuck your big bad monsters into the scrap straight away. Instead you need to think ahead, play with what you've got, and try and get yourself into a winning position.

Chaos Reborn: Adventures iOS review screenshot - A tight spot

Your goal is to kill the other wizard on the map, who's trying to do the same as you. Your opponent will have different cards and skills, so every battle feels like a special challenge to overcome.

There's so much depth to the combat here that breaking it down into easily digestible review snippets would leave us with a huge essay. In short you can bluff your opponent, flank them, hide from them, attack them head-on, and use your cards in a huge variety of different ways.

Sometimes you're fighting more than one opponent, and you need to balance out the alignment of a fight in your favour, spending cards of the right colour to make others of the same hue cheaper.

Chaos Reborn: Adventures iOS review screenshot - Half way through a game

There are games where you'll build up walls of vines to protect you while you conserve your mana and build up to unleashing your powerful spells. There are games when you'll be on the back foot, games when you'll be on the front, and games where you're not sure how the balance of power is going to play out turn-to-turn.

But the amount of options available to you, while daunting, makes for some truly memorable scraps. This is rarely a game about weight of numbers, and it encourages you to be intelligent and experimental with everything you do.

Get the staff

Yes there's a lot to read, and even more to take in. For one thing you can make fake versions of the cards you play, which don't leave corpses but can be revealed with a free spell by your opponent.

Discovering everything that Chaos Reborn: Adventures has to offer is one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. It fills the experience with little eureka moments, while not distracting from the density of the battles.

This is an expensive game, but there's so much more going on here than in pretty much any other strategy game you can grab for mobile. Is it worth it? If you're a fan of the genre than absolutely - this is without a doubt the best turn-based strategy game you can get for your phone or tablet.

Chaos Reborn: Adventures review - "The best turn-based strategy game for mobile?"

Chaos Reborn: Adventures doesn't try and take on the shape of a mobile game, and it actually really works
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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.