GI Joe: War on Cobra

While I'm not a huge fan of mobile gaming, every once in awhile a game comes along that I find interesting enough to download and take up some precious memory on my iPhone. The latest game that I seem to be playing for a few minutes each day is GI Joe: War on Cobra by Emerald City Games.

I'm going out on a limb to guess this game was released as Hasbro is gearing up another run of GI Joe action figures for retail shelves later this summer with GI Joe Classified. I say this is just a guess because the art style in the War on Cobra mobile game is more stylized and definitely different than the more serious tone the Classified series of action figures seems to be going with.

Upon downloading the game and launching it for the first time it had a very familiar feel. If your familiar with or have played the Transformers: Earth Wars, this is more of the same basically. If you enjoyed Earth Wars then this is good news. If Earth Wars wasn't your cup of tea, you still may want to try this one out.

The premise of the game is quite simple. 1) Build your headquarters to defend itself from the opposition's attack. 2) Go out into the field and attack the opposition's headquarters to win medals and materials. Each character or vehicle will have a predetermined point value (battle points), shown with a small red lightning bolt and a number. This is what it "costs" you to deploy that character/vehicle. You'll start with so many battle points to launch your attack. With each item or weapon you destroy of the opposition you'll be rewarded with more battle points. You can constantly launch your characters as long as you have battle points available. Once you run out and your last character dies, you have lost the fight and you'll go back to the map.

The interesting thing about War on Cobra is that you actually get to play both of the warring factions. I've always enjoyed the Cobra side of GI Joe more than the Joes themselves so I started off by selecting the Baroness and Cobra. This is where I've spent the most of my time playing the game - building up my volcano based headquarters with all sorts of weapons and traps. However playing the Joes has been fun too as I've unlocked different types of characters and vehicles to use and this keeps it fresh - going back and forth between the two factions.

If you select the Joes the first character you get to use is Roadblock. I love the Sigma-6 esque look to the character models. Roadblock will lay down a heavy layer of fire for you, but it's fairly slow moving on the battlefield.

Each character/vehicle has a different class. Roadblock falls into the Epic class, which is basically the top tier. You can level up your character/vehicle with gold and cards you get in the game. This will help improve the stats - health, range, damage and speed. You can also rank up your character using different items you unlock or are awarded with.

This is one of those games it tempts you to spend real world money on. Build your mini gun turret faster, buy in game currency to level up your characters...you get the drill. If you are patient and come back to the game at least once a day, you are awarded with free loot that will range from cards for your characters/vehicles to gold or even diamonds...which is basically the games currency.

I've been playing the game for several weeks now and have enjoyed it. Since starting I've managed to unlock several characters such as...

Each character has their own characteristics and attack style, making it tough sometimes to choose your army for attack. Snake Eyes for example will make short work of Cobra Troopers, while Gung-Ho or Bazooka can take out stronger enemies and weapons much faster. There are drawbacks for each character as well such as the larger characters are usually slower and land mines can take them out.

Once you've played the game for a bit you can start to unlock vehicles. This is where the game can really get fun...and tough at the same time. Knowing what vehicle to use makes a difference. Add one of your characters to the vehicle will unlock even more firepower.

All of the levels take place on the coast so you have a limited area where you can deploy water based vehicles. Sometimes you may have a battle that consists solely on the water, but most of the time is both land/water battles. I started with a lowly Devilfish, then unlocked the more powerful Megalodon. Most recently I unlocked the MOBAT and I love using it.

Above is what the map looks like. This is where you get to launch your attacks from. If the icon with the name shows a character, GI Joe in this case, then you are attacking the base of another player. If the icon is a generic crosshairs I believe these levels are just generic. The number below the icon tells you the level of the base. Obviously the higher the number, the more difficult the fight could be. As you level up your HQ's radar dish, you can expand upon the area on the map in which you can attack. The more options you have the better because your army may not be quite ready to take on some of the higher levels. You do have however the option of spending gold to swap out that tougher HQ. It may be replaced with a lower level or it may be replaced with an equally tough fight.

Earlier I mentioned that I started the game by choosing Cobra. I'm glad that (most of) the characters are different and play different as it makes it fun going back and forth playing both sides. I've devoted most of my time and resources to building up the Cobra side of things.

You start off your Cobra army with the Baroness. She starts off a little weak in the health department, but her ability is one shot, one kill on most enemies. Deploy her behind your front line of B.A.T.s or Cobra Troopers and she can be a pain in the butt for the Joes.

Eventually I unlocked Destro and Storm Shadow. Destro is meh in my book so I don't use him much. Scrap Iron is a lot of fun as he deploys and controls from a distance a little rocket pod. This is one of first characters you can use to take out airborne enemies. Storm Shadow is quite versatile and plays a lot like Snake Eyes.

I love deploying armies of B.A.T.s, then following them up with a some ground fire by a group of Cobra Troopers or SAW Vipers that I recently unlocked.

Cobra has always had some awesome vehicles and I'm glad to see that some of these have made their way into the game. Like with the Joes vehicles, drop a character into the vehicle and you'll have more firepower. The Maggot for instance. Standalone it will fire a machine gun from the front. With a pilot it will use it's massive cannon to launch spiked projectile bombs at your enemies!

I understand that mobile games can't compare to console games, however that doesn't mean that they can't be fun...at least in small chunks. Being a GI Joe fan I'm just happy that there is something new out there. The fact that the game is well designed and fun to play is a bonus. If you decide to download the game (it's free by the way) just pack some patience. Don't spend your real hard earned money on anything in the game just because you get frustrated or you don't want to wait. To me at least it's made to be played in short sessions. Enjoy it for what it is...a fun and somewhat addictive mobile game. Yo Joe!

Sky Force Reloaded (Android)

Sky Force Reloaded

Infinite Dreams (2006)

I like my physical games as much as any collector and I tend to stay away from playing many mobile games, however I've finally found a game that I can really get behind and feel comfortable recommending to others.

Sky Force Reloaded is the second game in the series, but boasts oh so many improvements of the original. It can be found in the Google Play store and the iTunes store for free. I've downloaded and tried a lot of different shmups and this is the first game that is fun to play.

For starters the game's visuals are beautiful. I play it on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 as I wanted a larger screen. Playing shmups on a small phone just doesn't do it for me. The controls are pretty responsive and there is a lot of content that keeps drawing me back in.

When you start the game you are on the overworld map if you will. The game forces you to replay the levels until you earn a certain amount of medals before the next level will be unlocked. Each level has 4 basic goals: destroy 70% of enemy forces, destroy 100% of enemy forces, rescue all people and stay untouched. 

Depending on your skill, the level of difficulty and the aircraft you are using, you may have to play the level multiple times in order to achieve these goals. Once you complete all 4 goals, the next level of difficulty will be unlocked.

 

Before you set out on your journey, you can select your aircraft from your personal hanger. At the beginning you just have one aircraft and it's pretty weak. It can be upgraded, but more on that in a minute. As you are playing you may come across aircraft parts you can grab. Successfully complete the level and you'll slowly unlock pieces to additional aircraft. As you can see from the above image, I've unlocked nearly all of the available aircraft. My favorite hands down is the one selected, the Octopus. It features multiple homing mini-rockets which really come in handy in the later, more difficult levels.

As you play the game, the destroyed enemies will leave behind stars. This is the games currency and you'll need a lot of these in order to upgrade your aircraft. You have multiple areas you can upgrade and several levels of upgrades. Most of them are self explanatory. The magnet is a helpful tool that I didn't initially pay a lot of attention to. The higher the level, the more the stars will be attracted to your aircraft.

To spice up the gamelay, cards were added to the game. These, like the aircraft parts, show up randomly as you play the game. Most of the time these items only appear on the higher levels of difficulty. These cards add new things to the game or give you new, improved abilities. 

Some of the cards may give you a laser to start the game, or increases your rate of fire. Others give you a stationary pod on the side of your aircraft that increases your firepower. The cards however come in two varieties. The ones you see in the first 4 rows are permanent, meaning you don't have to do anything with them. Once you've collected that card, you get that ability. The row of cards on the bottom are temporary cards. These come with a time limit that gives you some nice boosts...such as unlimited lives or maximum firepower. Of course once the time expires so does your boost in power.

 

New to Reloaded are pilots. You unlock these by completing certain objectives. I already played the game a lot to begin with, but now you are rewarded even more for your persistence. There are multiple Objectives to obtain, more than you see above. The more you get, the more pilots you unlock. Each pilot brings something different to the table. Currently I've been using Burton Panic as he will random trigger your laser or emit a bullet clearing EMP blast at times.

As you beat the bosses on select levels, you unlock golden trophies that you can easily share via social media. It always tracks the number of attempts (and the date) it took to beat the boss as well as the different difficulty levels you've completed.

At the end of the level you are given a summary, tallying up your base score, stars collected, humans rescued, etc. If you beat your previous best score, it will add it to your high score which is a collection of your final scores.

Enough of the boring menu screens, want to see some actual gameplay? Using my iPhone I tried to record myself playing through a few levels. It was hard looking through the phone trying to play the game and ultimately I didn't do as well as I'm capable of, but hopefully you'll get an idea of just how much fun this game is.

Through one of the many updates to the game, it now is easier to find others to play the game with. You can compete for the top score and play weekly tournaments against each other. If you like what you see and want to add me to your friends list, use this ID:

91 22 69 72

Sky Force Reloaded, and the first game, Sky Force, are some really fun shmups. They don't feel cheap like a lot of the shmup games I've found in the Google Play store. I wish I had a way to play the game on my TV with a proper controller, but for now this is my go to game that I enjoy playing for 30 mins or whatever each evening.

I will add that right now for the month of December, there is a special Christmas themed level you can play and compete in a month long high score tournament. You can't use any of your unlocked aircraft from your hanger, but give it a try as it's a challenging level with laser shooting snowmen that are sure to infuriate you!