Game Reviews

Hills of Glory: WWII

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Hills of Glory: WWII

In-app purchases can be a tricky business to get right, but some can provide additional value, or prove helpful to strugglers by allowing them to pay to gain an advantage.

Infinity Blade is an example of a game that understands the benefits of such a setup – offering content that is desirable to players without breaking the game’s balance for anyone but those with a lot of money and little willpower.

Hills of Glory: WWII, meanwhile, feels like a much more cynical use of IAP, with just a single 59p purchase transforming a difficult grind of a game into a doddle.

Given the lack of penalty for spending your way to success and the slow progress you’ll make without help, it’s all too tempting to pay once and regret it forever after.

Napalm dearth

It’s a great pity, as Bulkypix’s latest is otherwise a good-looking and well-produced tower defence game.

Rather than positioning emplacements to protect a base, your job is to keep your truck intact by shooting encroaching enemy troops before they get close enough to return fire.

Your three soldiers – a shooter, a gunner, and a support character – each have two weapons to take on the advancing armies. Tapping on an enemy soldier sees you let off a rifle shot, while dragging a vertical line down the screen results in a volley of machine gun fire.

Shoot the runners

Grenades, meanwhile, are activated by holding your finger in place for a second or two, while pinching might drop a barrel of napalm or release a cloud of poison gas. Each weapon has a cool-off period, so while the shooter is almost constantly firing your support will have to be put to more judicious use.

Defeat the enemy waves – which gradually swell to include vehicles – and you’ll move onto the next mission, your rank increasing steadily.

You’ll pick up coins for successful missions (and even a few if you fail) which can be used to train your troops, levelling them up and increasing the power of their attacks.

The slogs of war

Unfortunately, progress is so sluggish that you’ll hit several difficulty spikes unless you replay levels several times over, earning enough to unlock more powerful characters.

Should you be unable to resist temptation, the wad of cash your 59p nets you is enough to unlock a high-level trio who’ll blitz through the entire second campaign in no time.

By the time you reach the third and final set of stages, if you’ve chosen to ‘cheat’ then the mindlessness of the action will have begun to bite. If you’ve toughed it out, the repetition will have turned the game into an interminable slog.

Either way, you’re left slightly disappointed by a game that promised so much. There’s still enjoyment to be had – seeing a group of dim-witted foes disintegrated by a tesla cannon in seconds is the definition of a guilty pleasure – but Hills of Glory: WWII proves that in-app purchases can be seriously damaging to your game’s health.

Hills of Glory: WWII

Hills of Glory: WWII is an entertaining tower defence romp, but it's too difficult without IAPs and too easy with them
Score
Chris Schilling
Chris Schilling
Chris has been gaming since the age of five, though you wouldn't think it to see him play. Thankfully, his knowledge of the medium is as impressive as his unerring ability to fail at Angry Birds.