Paper Wars: Cannon Fodder - PS Minis Review
Written by Troy Benedict Friday, 04 March 2011 11:55
Developer/Producer ifun4all has taken the tower defense style of gaming and created a quick and easy game titled Paper Wars: Cannon Fodder.
Compared to other tower defense games, Paper Wars keeps the action simple and straight-forward by giving you full control of a single defense: a massive cannon whose goal is to blow stuff up.
A constant stream of crudly drawn paper soldiers will come in waves from the right side of the screen. The objective can vary from mission to mission, but the overall goal is to keep enemies from reaching the left side of the screen by blowing up as many of them as possible.
Shooting enemies is easy. Simply pressing and holding the cannon’s attack button will allow you to charge up the power of your shot. The longer you hold down the button, the more powerful the blast radius will be when the missile lands.
As the game progresses, the soldiers will move in larger groups, or small clusters spread far apart, march in different patterns, or move much faster.
Along the way, you’ll gain power-ups that will assist you in your goal of blowing up the bad guys. Power-ups come in assortment of styles. Some will grant you an additional special attack, which sends a cluster of missiles to the location of your choosing. One power-up will allow you to detonate an explosive device at that location. An another example of a power-up is a limited-time fully-charged string of missile attacks that don’t require you to hold down the attack button before firing away. Of course, these power-ups are at your disposal as long as the blast radius of your attacks doesn’t destroy them first.
Paper Wars: Cannon Fodder is a lot of fun. The variety of goals per level helps keep the game from feeling too redundant from mission to mission. Some missions require you to destroy a specific number of soldiers while making sure that no more than a certain number of enemies make it past your defenses. Other missions will require you to destroy a certain type of soldier. There are also survival missions where you must defend yourself for a set amount of time (e.g., 120 seconds) without allowing enough enemies to break through.
Paper Wars has a purposely crude, hand-drawn style to it, which is also part of its charm. It’s almost as if somebody had filmed stop-motion animation of different scraps of paper. It looks best on the small screen of a PSP where the pixelation isn’t quite as noticeable as it might be on a 50” HDTV via the PS3.
As mentioned above, like other PlayStation Minis, Paper Wars: Cannon Fodder can be played on both the PlayStation 3 and on PSP handhelds. I have to admit that the game felt better and looked slightly better on the PSP.
Paper Wars: Cannon Fodder will cost you $5, which I think is a decent price with the ability to play them on both the PlayStation 3 or your PlayStation Portable.
If you’re looking for a different take on the tower defense games, I’d recommend checking it out.
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