iFun4all marketed Paper Wars as an attempt to create the worst game ever. This clever marketing gimmick was certainly effective at getting my attention, but does the game live up to the anti-hype?

Is it truly the worst game ever?

Paper Wars is a tower defense game where you are the tower. You control a tank/turret as waves of enemies march forward. The key strategy revolves around either charging up your shot for a single massive explosion, or firing off quick, smaller bursts. Victory is a balancing act between the two.

You can’t spray the battlefield with explosions either. Since the shots have a travel time to them, you’ll need to line up your shots and aim for where enemies are going to be rather than where they are at.

There are bits and pieces of a story, but there really isn’t much to it other than “there are enemy soldiers that need to get exploded”.

There are three campaigns in Paper Wars; Classic, Winter Assault, and Cyber Wars. At first you can only play the Classic campaign, but ten victories there opens up Winter Assault. Ten victories in Winter Assault opens up Cyber Wars. Winter Assault limits the number of rockets you have at your disposal, and Cyber Wars gives you three different rocket types which do more damage to one of three different enemy types. But really, all the game modes boil down to “stop the advancing enemy soldiers”.

There are numerous power ups that pop up in the game. Some of them slow the enemies down, some cause explosions and some will give you another special attack. Using these power ups effectively (and before they are blown up) is the difference between an easy victory and a sure defeat. It is this frantic mix of planning and the simple joy of blowing stuff up that kept my interest.

While it does try to vary the action with the different modes and battle restrictions, it really all boils down to blowing up advancing hordes. I never felt like the game was truly deviating from the core concept. What was there was enough to keep me entertained, but I can’t help but wish they had added a little more to the mix.

Paper War’s unique visual style has all of the enemies crudely drawn on what looks like torn bits of paper. When they are damaged they fade like someone was messing with the opacity setting in Photoshop. When they die they will often leave behind massive amounts of blood.

The only real negative for me was the sound. I found it grating and annoying. I know this is probably what they were aiming for, but it doesn’t excuse the fact that after a couple of minutes with the game you’ll be taking the headphones off or hitting your TV’s mute button.

In the end, I enjoyed my time with Paper Wars: Cannon Fodder, it was definitely one of the best mini’s that I have played. So it looks like iFun4all needs to try a little harder if they want to make the worst game ever. For under $5 the game will most definitely keep you entertained.

Tags: iFun4all, Paper Wars: Cannon Fodder, Playstation Mini, ps3, psp, tower defense

This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2011 at 5:00 am and is filed under Indie Games, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.