W.A.R.P. Review

W.A.R.P. is a castle defense game that is unlike any other castle defense app on the iPhone. In fact, castle defense in its current form may not be an apt description of W.A.R.P. at all, because it is really a game of Earth defense.

For having such a lofty mission statement (saving the Earth), W.A.R.P. is a fairly simple game where you use W.A.R.P.'s to redirect incoming meteors with gravitational fields. I know that it sounds complicated, but it isn't.

You start each level with an open map of space with Earth on the left side of the screen. The Earth in this game is a lovely looking recreation of our home planet and contains exactly 10 billion people. The game then starts with a few asteroids flying in towards Earth. If they hit the lovely planet, the population takes a dip, which is obviously not a good thing. To defend the planet, you must use the Wayward Asteroid Redirection Program (W.A.R.P.), which is really just a series of black hole looking things. To activate a hole, all you have to do is touch the screen. When an asteroid approaches the hole, the gravitational field will bend the asteroid out of the way of the Earth so it can live for another day. Also, the longer you hold your finger down on the screen, the larger the hole will get... just in case you need to cover a large area.

The challenge really starts when the game starts throwing 5-10 asteroids at you at once, along with flaming meteors and ice comets. Because your W.A.R.P.'s are fairly large in size, you must try to heard as many as you can with each hole, hopefully having them crash into each other, which eliminates them from the playing field. Eventually though, you will run into instances in which you cannot defend the lovely planet, and then you must use the rechargeable planetary shield, which makes the planet temporarily invincible.

Even with all of these defense tricks up your sleeve, the destruction of the earth is inevitable. Eventually you'll get mauled by asteroids and you will see the Earth grow red with embers, and along with the red glow, you will see the population go from a cool 10 billion down to nothing, and then you'll see the planet explode into a cloud of dust. Because of this inevitable ending, W.A.R.P. doesn't score you on asteroids exploded (although it does track it) or holes created, it scores you by the number of years that you kept the world alive.

For what it is, W.A.R.P. is a fine game with nice graphics that won't disappoint. Unfortunately, after a number of plays, as well as a number of exploded planets, the thought of going through unsuccessfully saving the planet seems rather dull. With just asteroid deflection in your arsenal, one can't help but long for the day that Earth gets a gun of some sort, or some kind of space ship defender that can help out.

Overall, I'd say that W.A.R.P. is a fairly decent way to spend 10 minutes of your time. It won't entertain you forever, and for a time waster, it's not quite to the level of the likes of Orbital and geoDefense Swarm, but it's not bad. It has good graphics and a quality build, but there just isn't enough variety to make this a top tier experience.