FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
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Mon, 13th May 2013
FYI, this story is more than a year old

There’s been plenty of slash and bash tower defence games for the iOS lately.

Trying to create the same sense as the strategy games that appear on the PC can be rather difficult.

You don’t have much screen space to work with and you don’t want to make it too complicated.

What Arcticmill has attempted to do is a simple battle between two castles, with each player casting out troops to defeat the other castle.

There are only four types of units, the type being gatherers who cut up trees and earn gold for the castle.

With this money you can pay for either foot soldiers, archers or knights, which you place on your side of the field.

From here your troops walk idle forward attacking anything in its direction. Beyond that there isn’t much strategy beyond striking enemy troops with player directed missiles and thunder.

Unlike other fantasy inspired app games, Castle Raid features no upgrades. Beyond different types of battlefield, there’s not much to for the player to keep playing until the end.

If you get stuck on a level – and you will do since the enemy’s troops can easily overwhelm you – you can pay to unlock levels you haven’t reached, but that feels like a rip-off.

The game features a multiplayer option which allows players to compete against their friends using the same device.

To make matters worse, you have to unlock the later levels in the single player mode before you can play them on multiplayer.

Despite being a clever idea, because the gameplay itself is uninspired, players will get bored of the multiplayer mode very quickly.

This game showed a lot of promise, but unfortunately fails to keep the player’s interest.

Because there are better tower defence for the iOS, Castle Raid isn’t worth giving up your hard earned cash.

Rating: 1/5