app review: Slug Wars

Slug wars is all about winning, right in the lane of fire. Armed with indomitable army snails and slugs, the basic objective of this game is to wipe out the enemy coming from the other lane. Played out on the garden battlefield divided into 3 lanes, at your disposal are 8 different kinds of soldiers, with different strengths, speeds and ranges of attack.

Slug Wars follows the basic tenets of the tower defense/real time strategy genre – there are fast and easy units to create and mobilize, medium-range types that do a little more damage and the super weapons that do maximum damage. The occasional flower blooming on the field is the currency of unit deployment and survival. Since the game plays out on three lanes only, your focus will be on managing your queue of soldiers, making sure they are equal or superior to, the enemy’s.

The control scheme is fairly simple. You use the slider to select which unit you want to deploy and tapping on the lane of your choice to send units. At the same time, you can view what the opponent is likewise sending out to meet you since the other side of the field is a mirror image of your own. From here, you can anticipate which units to use and when.

There are three basic modes: Campaign, Skirmish and Slug it Out. Skirmish is all out war with the AI player while Slug It Out allows two human players to fight it out. The tricky part in Slug Wars is managing the queues. This game has a strong offensive component – one of its plus points and you need to gain ground as you not only push back the enemy, you have to dominate the lane in order to capture his side. There are only three chances to survive the onslaught, and after a while it gets harder to keep track of all the activities happening in each lane.

Graphics and sounds play a pivotal role and making Slug Wars stand out not among only similar games, but even as against the seminal Plants vs Zombies which arrived recently. The slugs are cute, funny and feisty creatures – armed with salt shakers, lobbing pellets and attacking with gusto. Voice acting makes a huge difference here, as the distinct and funny battle cry of each slug makes the game a friendly and hilarious assault on the senses – “Yamler?” will find its way into your head for the rest of the day after playing the game. I enjoy the sound effects very much, but some in-game music or the option to play my own music would also be a good option to have.

While Slug Wars is a rip roaring experience the first few times you play it, it still needs some depth and variety in order to effectively compete against an ever growing TD/RTS genre. Even with different levels of difficulty, it’s not that difficult to play in part owing to the lack of variety in the gameplay. It needs to up the ante in terms of challenge – for example, it deviates from most TD/RTS games in the sense that there’s no recharging time for each unit: a simple, yet effective stumbling block in the deployment of units. More lanes in the higher levels would also be a good addition. The slider controls need some minor tweaking so it’s easier to monitor unit deployment – highlighting the unit deployed to confirm that the slug has been sent out to the queue will minimize confusion and make queue management a lot easier.

There’s no option yet to upgrade units and weapons, as well as power ups, more obstacles and additional twists to the gameplay. The developers have promised to incorporate user feedback and I am looking forward to a massive update. In this update, I hope to see Open Feint and social media integration, as well as achievements to be unlocked.

Overall, Slug Wars has a huge potential to become a breakout TD/RTS game with some enhancements and updates. As it is, it’s definitely a game worth having and the continuous updates worth waiting for.

Learn more about Slug Wars for iPhone and iPod touch in the App Store