Cartoon Wars: Tower Defence action with stick men and monsters fighting it out for survival

Cartoon Wars: Tower Defence action with stick men and monsters fighting it out for survival

Stick men type graphics have never been a turn off for me in terms of simple games. One may interpret this as a lack of imagination and skill at creating “proper” game characters but from a practical stand point it means that the developers have chosen to focus more on gameplay than graphics. I was originally quite excited to see this stickman TD game as I hoped that the gameplay would stand by itself however was disappointed to find out otherwise.

Gameplay: Cartoon wars offers something a little different from the traditional TD game, rather than a game of survival by defending yourself against a set number of waves of enemies, the aim is to defeat your enemy’s tower by sending your units across the battlefield. Each of your soldiers are then engaged in a game of tug-of-war as you try to swing the battle in your favour in order to attack and topple your enemy tower.

In order to send troops however you need to save up enough mana during the battle. Your mana will slowly mount up as time goes by, possibly a little too slowly as it’s always difficult to survive the early pushes from the enemy. Luckily you have an archer on the top of your tower that you control as additional defence which will definitely come in handed especially for the later stages. Although the controls for the archers are clunky to say the least, rather than being able to tap on where you want to fire to, you control the angle of the shooting arrows with a seemingly unresponsive slide bar.

Up to 20 different units are available in your arsenal, however you are only able to use the lowly warrior to begin with. Unlocking more powerful units requires the spending of gold coins and gems both of which you earn whilst playing more of the game. However as with most freemium games out on the market at the moment, in order to unlock any decent unit in a respectable time requires you to reach for your wallet and part with your cash. The balance of which was off-putting in that, very quickly it became obvious that you needed to spend some money if you didn’t want to spend hours tirelessly grinding.

One of the most disappointing aspects of Cartoon wars is not its gameplay however, it’s the animation. The movement is just far too jumpy to really enjoy, as I would have expected it to be much smoother given the simplicity of the characters.

Verdict: 2/5 A promising looking TD game that ultimately fails to deliver in many respects. If you have lots of time to kill and love the TD genre and do not mind bad presentation then you may like this, otherwise there are many better alternatives on the Android market.

Cartoon Wars Promotional Youtube Video