I’ve been playing a lot of “Great Little Wargame,” and frankly, it lives up to its name. It has a relatively simple set of mechanics but surprising amounts of depth, much like the Advance Wars series. Not that it’s an Advance Wars clone like Mecho Wars, it’s just the same style of game.
The campaign starts off a little slow, introducing just a couple of unit types. You have to be somewhat patient with it, since it only really starts to shine when you start building vehicles as well as infantry.
It’s a turn-based game played on a hex grid. Each unit can make one attack per turn, but it can make it before, after, or in the middle of movement. Lethality is very high; a basic infantry attack does 75% damage to most kinds of infantry, so getting the first strike in is important. If your attack does not kill the target, it will counterattack, unless you’re attacking outside the target’s range. Battles tend to flow back and forth over the terrain, as you move forward, shoot, and then move back to get out of range of undamaged units.
Range is a significant advantage, since a range-3 unit attacking a range-2 unit from 3 hexes away won’t suffer any retaliation. Terrain is significant because units with a 1 level height advantage gain +1 range, and 2 levels (rare outside specific scenarios) gives +2 range.
Unlike Advance Wars, the focus tends to be mostly on infantry, and basic infantry (“Grunts”) are a staple even late in the campaign. The reasons are threefold: Grunts are much cheaper than any other unit, pack significant firepower, and most vehicles are only indifferent at killing infantry. Artillery is the exception, and the main reason you buy tanks is to kill artillery, which is murderous against all infantry types but weak against vehicles. This in turn means you buy anti-tank infantry and rocket launchers to defend against tanks which might make short work of your artillery. Naval and air units have their own, expected dominance graphs, with units specializing in anti-ship, anti-air, or anti-ground roles.
Income comes from oil wells, which must be captured by engineers. Engineers have no attack, and are consumed once they finish capturing an oil well or factory. In a few scenarios, they can also capture neutral vehicles.
The AI is mixed. It’s reasonably intelligent tactically, but sometimes it does some awfully stupid things. A couple of scenarios were much easier than they should have been because the AI built too many engineers and sent them in without clearing away my units first, so a single Grunt in a chokepoint could slaughter them all. Despite that, the game was challenging enough to be interesting on “basic” difficulty. I haven’t tried the advanced difficulties yet, since I’ve just finished the campaign and unlocked “medium” difficulty.
The game is 3D. My single interface gripe is that when you’ve got air units, particularly air transports, it can be quite difficult to select the unit under the air unit, or move the air unit one hex. Fortunately, you can freely rotate the map using a “twist” gesture, which can be really handy if you need to select something an air unit is obscuring.
I got it for free during one of those one-day sales, but there’s a demo version available. It’s $0.99 for the SD version, $2.99 for the HD / iPad version. That gets you 20 campaign scenarios and 23 skirmish maps. They’ve got a variety of map packs, but I think most of them are for the HD version only; I could only find “Holiday from Hell” (15 maps) and “All out War” (10 maps) for sale in the SD version.
Definitely recommended.
