Squad Wars: Death Division review

Developer: Cmune

Price: Free
Version: 1.6
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2

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There have been quite a few attempts to bring multiplayer shooters to iOS, and it seems that most of them are lacking in some way or have just enough design issues to keep them from being winners. Because of this, I've always been intrigued by any fps that releases on the App Store in hopes that it will bring uncompromised shooter action to the platform. Unfortunately, Squad Wars: Death Division is not this game. In fact, it's a notably poor first-person shooter, primarily because of just how buggy it is.

Simple shooting

When you first boot up Squad Wars, you'll be taken through a brief tutorial of how to use the basic controls. From there, you're dumped into the game's menu system, where you'll have free reign to dive into multiplayer matches.

In these matches, don't expect to aim down sights, sprint, or even duck. Squad Wars has a super-streamlined set of controls that focus solely on moving, shooting, changing weapons, and reloading. For a game with touch controls, this simplicity is appreciated, since putting too many buttons on a screen can make controlling things a little too hard.

Senseless warring

As simple as Squad Wars's control scheme is, playing the game is awfully confusing thanks to what seems to be a combination of bizarre design choices and some bugs.

Matches in Squad Wars, for example, have a kill limit, which--in most shooters--means that the first player to meet a certain kill count wins the match. This is not the case in Squad Wars. Instead, the kill limit is a cumulative total of kills that must be reached before the game is over.

To illustrate just how strange this is, this means that if you play a 1-on-1 match with someone and the kill limit is five, the first player that gets three kills will win, but only until five kills are made. This means that midway through a match, the winner can already be determined if they get three kills quickly.

As for bugs, Squad Wars has its fair share, including one that makes your guns disappear and unusable. There's also one that prevents you from picking up ammo, which you start off with precious little of in the first place.

Tastes of victory

The most upsetting thing about Squad Wars is that I can see a good game inside of its weird, broken shell. It has an intriguing upgrade system, solid matchmaking, and even good control options (including MFi controller support).

If Squad Wars were simply a bad game, its issues wouldn't feel as disappointing as they are. I'm not sure simply fixing these problems would even make Squad Wars a great experience either, but they would make it a heck of a lot better than it is right now.

The bottom line

When Squad Wars isn't bugging out on you, things like tiny maps and a record button that apparently does nothing are still there to get under your skin. It's all a real shame too, because somewhere underneath Squad Wars's myriad issues, there's something good there. It's just too hard to get to right now.