World Conqueror 2 for Android: Daily App Pick

Posted By Puching Zhang in App Picks, Gaming, Lifehacks, Mobile

BreakingModern — Tanks, artillery and cannon fodder. For me those terms spell strategy gaming. Personally, most of my strategy-game experience comes through a PC and the Total War series (don’t you dare hound me Starcraft II fans, Total War is the best strategy franchise there is). However, World Conqueror 2 is a well-designed mobile-strategy game that will appeal to the hearts of any PC strategy gamer and, for me, brought back fond memories of the Advance Wars series, the best game series of my childhood.

Campaign

World Conqueror 2 has four different campaigns, which cover the Second World War and subsequent Cold War. The player can play as the Axis, Allies, NATO and WTO (the Warsaw Pact). Each campaign involves a series of scenarios the player must complete to unlock the following one.

I enjoy the high detail of the campaigns. The WWII scenarios follow a (mostly) historically accurate portrayal of the campaigns of both sides. But be warned, each scenario gradually picks up in difficulty, so a lot of the tricks and tools will have to be learned on the fly. This game isn’t for beginners — while the tutorial teaches you the basics, experience is what it takes to truly master this game (I would know from my first epic failures).

The scenarios are great because they have a wide range of situations and none are hugely repetitive or boring, which is what usually happens. As a bonus, there are historical figures in the campaigns, such as Patton, Montgomery or Yamamoto. Each commands his respective armies in battle, which is great to play along with. I’ll also have to give props to EasyTech for creating the Cold War campaigns, which I find original and entertaining, even though some levels are based on real life events.

Conquest Mode

The second main game mode in the game is “conquest,” which is your classic turn-based strategy game. Now conquest mode isn’t just a redux of Risk, even though it retains many of its features (like taking every one of your opponent’s tiles, moving your pieces one tile at a time, and so on). The key differences in World Conqueror 2 are that the game factors in health, unit attack and defense, along with other variables, giving it a sophisticated game algorithm that offers advanced and addicting gameplay.

Conquest also includes eight different scenarios, with the nations in each scenario divided into two teams, and some extra nations, which are neutral. The inclusion of teams separates this game even more from Risk because there’s not the free-for-all strategy that most players would use when trying to defeat all their enemies at once. Instead, they try to coordinate with their teammates and work together to defeat their enemies (or act like the Allies and Stalin at the end of WWII and make a giant land grab).

Mechanics

Gameplay isn’t as simple as you would think at first look. There’s a wide variety of units, and the key to victory isn’t about how much you create, or what type you create, but rather how you use the units you create. The unit selection is pretty well balanced and lets players counter pretty much any offensive or defensive strategy. The balance between units is what propelled RTS games like Starcraft II forward (yes, I admit it, Starcraft is a great game!) and the fact that going straight for elite units or spamming huge amounts of crappy units guarantees victory plays into the strategic thinking of gamers. All this makes the game more strategic like chess.

That being said, when two units battle, the camera zooms in to the real time clash between those units, and thank god, too, because it looks just like the Advance Wars battle cinematics I admired in the past. Besides the childhood memories it brought up, I enjoy a real-time battle cinematic in a turn-based strategy game.

And yes, I know what you guys are going to say now: This Total War fanboy is using this opportunity to promote the mix of real-time and turn-based strategy gaming. I am, I can’t deny that, but if the game only included game pieces moving on a map while behind the scenes computer algorithms decided the battles, wouldn’t that be so boring? The real-time scenes make the battles come to life, which lets you picture your men being ripped apart or emerge victorious in the battle. The fact that World Conqueror 2 includes such scenes really does improve the graphics by a whole lot, not to mention the overall quality of the game.

For all its greatness and glamor, I’ll have to give World Conqueror 2 a 9/10. While it isn’t perfect, this game does come close. It’s an upgrade from the turn-based goodness in classics like Risk and adds superior graphics, diversity of units and a heap of other features that put it ahead of many other mobile strategy games out there. World Conqueror 2 is free to play (thank god!) and is available for Android on Google Play and Apple iOS.

For BMod, I’m Puching Zhang.

All screenshots: EasyTech