Siegecraft Review

Hypothesis: hitting stuff with a catapult is awesome. Evidence: Siegecraft. This game takes place across over a dozen missions, where players use crossbows and catapults to take out enemies and structures. Some missions involve destroying bridges before enemies can cross them, defending a crown from being stolen, surviving an oncoming zombie horde, and more. Players can earn and purchase coins that go toward new types of ammo, and weapon upgrades.

This game is visually-stunning, and its missions have a great sense of scope to them; some levels involve cutting enemies off from great distances. The game is really quite simple to play, however. There's a great satisfaction that comes from launching an explosive barrel at an enemy about to cross a bridge, or to fire an arrow straight through a zombie. The aforementioned zombie level and crown defense level are available in endless flavors for high scores and coin collection. The game is universal, and iPad owners can play against another player on the same device. The game's level structure is wonderful; all missions are unlocked right from the get-go, instead of having to trudge through certain levels that might be frustrating.

In any level with elevation, the crossbow seemingly becomes useless, which makes me question why it's available on some levels at all if it isn't meant to reliably be used. Especially on the iPad, the controls, which are centered around the weapon on-screen, are cause for some definite finger contortionism in order to aim at certain spots. Offset controls to help aim and set power would help greatly. The game does tend to suffer from some sluggishness on the iPod touch 4 and iPad 1; it's nothing that will ruin the gameplay experience but it is a bit annoying. Definitely restart after installing the game, though.

There are two particular features that are going to be interesting to check out once iOS 5 launches: the turn-based multiplayer and iCloud saves. This review will be updated with a full report on those features once iOS 5 is up and running. Still, even on iOS 4, there's some visually-stunning entertainment to be had here.