Land Air Sea Warfare

Thanks to advances in communication technology, modern warfare can often be an elaborate, finely choreographed affair. When it's not all going horribly wrong, that is.

When all goes to plan, multiple land, sea, and air units can move and converge on a target with nigh-on-perfect timing.

While iPhone games often take us to exotic worlds or turn us into professional sportsmen, they've struggled to offer up many convincing approximations of large-scale conflict. The sheer size and level of multitasking is too much to ask of the wee touchscreen, it seems.

Land Air Sea Warfare goes some way to addressing that imbalance. Like every other RTS on iPhone, it has had to make some major concessions to the host platform, but unlike other games these dont relate to unit count or the ability to launch complex multi-pronged attacks.

The range of units at your command is truly impressive. As the title suggests, there are multiple types of land, sea, and air units, each fulfilling a specific function (the weakest air unit, for example, remains useful throughout as a nippy recon vehicle).

There are just as many structures to invest in, including numerous types of power generators spread across you guessed it land, air, and sea. There are war factories to build, defensive turrets and walls to construct, and hulking mega-weapons to save up for.

All this would be for nought if the combat wasnt balanced and fluid, but Land Air Sea Warfare doesnt disappoint on that front either. Units can be selected individually with a tap, but this facility swiftly becomes redundant as your armys headcount soars.

You can drag a box over multiple units using two fingers, and a double tap on a unit will select all units of its kind. This is only of real use when structuring your four groups, though.

Its this group facility that lies at the heart of Land Sea Air Warfares combat system. As you begin to construct offensive units, they automatically get assigned to three different groups according to type land, air, and sea again which are represented by permanent shortcut commands along the right hand side of the screen.

A fourth squad is left free for you to assemble to your own specification a simple case of selecting a unit and pressing and holding a team, or using the command shortcuts. You can also define the other three groups in the same way.

Other RTS games have used such a squad system, but few execute it this well. Launching pincer attacks is quick and easy to do, with units responding without fuss to your commands.

Another reason for this success is the restraint Isotope 244 has shown on a technical level. The developer has eschewed detailed 3D graphics in favour of a clean, zoomed out 2D view that affords a good view of the battlefield and only stutters when things get really hectic.

Of course, this does mean that the game isnt exactly a visual showpiece for what the iPhone can do, and theres no fancy pinch-zooming or rotating on offer here. As a result, it can be tough to discern individual units.

Shadows, too, look a little dodgy, and the whole game resembles a PC RTS from 15 to 20 years ago.

On the whole, though, the stripped back approach to visuals is a worthwhile compromise.

Slightly tougher to accept is the skirmish-only nature of the single-player mode. Theres no real structure to play you simply enter one of the randomly generated maps with up to three AI opponents and aim to be the last man standing.

Still, the variety of modifiers you can apply to each game from participant number and ability to the terms of victory (destroy your opponents base or race to develop a mega weapon, for example) and default technology levels makes for a surprisingly varied game, so theres plenty of fun to be had here.

Much less forgivable (especially in light of the single-player deficiencies) is the total lack of a multiplayer mode. Id argue that no modern iPhone RTS with aspirations to be the best in its class should be without the means to take on others.

That a game containing such finely balanced elements and operating on such a large scale fails to include it borders on the tragic. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future update.

Land Air Sea Warfare has a fine foundation in place from which to spring a devastating offensive on its RTS rivals. Few on iPhone can match the ease with which it handles large scale battles.

However, its flanks have been left cruelly exposed by an incomplete single-player offering and a total lack of multiplayer facilities.