On the list of things that can distract one from writing the next great American novel comes Cartoon Wars: Gunner.
A HUGE fan of the original Cartoon Wars game (I wrote something up on that game last year), I was really psyched when I saw that they’d come up with a new game. With the original, you had two towers on opposite sides of a battlefield. bad guys streamed out of the enemy tower – all stick figures with cool weapons & big heads, and you had to fight them off. Between battles you could upgrade to different kinds of soldiers.
With Gunner, they’ve amped up the fun and the upgrades.
You start out as a simple bowman:
As you fight, you gain gold which you can use to upgrade your bowman’s speed, power, range and skill (which I’ve done in the screenshot above). You also have a host of other attributes that you can also upgrade in between battles – if you have the gold.
Just as you upgrade, so do your enemies, going from simple spearman to bowman, gunman and monsters of all sorts – jumping spiders, leaping tigers, fire spitting dragons – even guys in battle armor. To fight them, you need to upgrade out of the bow and arrow phase and into something a little more powerful. Lucikly, you have tons of choices.
The very next thing (in affordable gold) that you can buy is the semi-automatic rifle. Slow and steady, this thing blows away most of the bad guys and, just like the bow, has it’s own upgrades to increase it’s power.
While playing the game, I also got the next step up in weapons – the twin automatic pistols. Then I decided that I needed to jump to the end of the book, so to speak. So I stopped upgrading everything and I started hoarding gold until I could afford this: (80k gold)
Yep. It’s a BattleSuit. A mech, even.
And it’s friggin suhweet!
“Oh.. that’s right. I’m just a harmless looking guy standing over here minding my own business… that’s it… come closer… closer…”
“BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”
Your main weapons are, of course, your guns, but you also have some other stuff to play with.
Each weapon has it’s own ‘mega weapon’. The Twin Pistols, for example, has lightning that ZAPS the bad guys. The Bow has flaming meteors that fall from the sky and the BattleSuit drops bombs.
Some added stuff – your weapons (except for the bow), heat up. If you look at the image above, you’ve got three icons in the upper left – each is a different weapon (you can have 3 equipped at any one time). You can switch between them by tapping the icon or pressing the button with the arrows circling it. If the weapon you’re on overheats, you automatically switch to the next one.
The red button on the left controls your gunner, who can run left, right, up and down – the battlefield is wider than your screen, so you can run back and forth across it. The blue button is your ‘fire’ button and you can shoot left or right as needed and, with certain weapons, you can fire while running. This is handy as you can run right to escape, and still be firing left or behind you.
Standing still you are the most accurate and your automatic weapons will fire faster.
Overall, this is a great game to play. You can jump in, fight a couple battles, save the game and come back later. Perfect for break time 🙂
Cartoon Wars: Gunner is for the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can get it at the App Store for just $0.99, which is an awesome price (Clicking this link will launch iTunes and take you right to the games page).
~P
