Review: COD: Winter Assault

Now before the hate mail starts pouring in let me make one thing perfectly clear, this review has nothing to do with the Call of Duty series whatsoever. COD in this case stands for “Crap of Defense”, which is a tower defense game for the IPhone, made by the people over at IFun4All. They have just recently released an update entitled “Winter Assault”, and I have to say that even though not much has really changed on the surface, it is still an enjoyable and addictive experience nonetheless. Who needs 1080p graphics when you can see little pieces of paper blow up instead.

Developer/Publisher:IFun4All
Genre:Tower Defense
Platform(s):IPhone, IPod Touch, IPad
If you like:Watching paper cutouts of people explode, using powerups that freeze enemies in their place, and addictive yet satisfying gameplay.

Obviously everything about the presentation has remained the same, so there’s no real need to go into too much detail about. For those of you who did not read my first review of this game, I’ll do a quick recap for you. Catchy War themed music and explosive sound effects make up the audio presentation. The paper cutouts of characters give the game a unique visual style, and the backgrounds are simple and effective, usually consisting of nothing more than one solid color. It will only take about five seconds for anybody with at least some casual knowledge of video games to pick up on the controls, touch the screen to collect powerups and shoot down badguys, that’s it.



What sets Winter Assault apart from it’s predecessor is the changes that have been made to the core gameplay in order to add another level of strategy to the overall experience. Instead of using an unlimited amount of ammo to dispose of the enemies onscreen, the player is now limited to a certain amount of missiles that they can use. New powerups have also been included, my favorite of which is an ice missile, it can freeze a large group of soldiers at once, allowing you to rank up as many points as possible. There will still be times in which spamming the screen with missiles will be the way to go, but it’s nice to see the developers add a little more depth to keep the player on their toes every once in awhile.

There are 12 missions to play through, each one more difficult than the other, but it should take you no longer than about 2 hours to complete all of them. A gold, silver, or bronze medal can be earned based on the amount of soldiers that make it past enemy lines. For the high score junkies out there, they can try their hands at the survival mode. Each mode can be played on one of three difficulty settings, making it accessible to both casual and hardcore gamers alike.

Winter Assault is a nice little update to what was already a fantastic game. For letting some aggression out on the go, it doesn’t get much better than this. (A)

 - Matt H.