#ibomber attack

Genre: Vehicular Combat Developer: Cobra Mobile Price: £4.99

Oh dear, this is inopportune. It is currently 10:35 and thanks to the onset of E3 and the nearly wall-to-wall press conference coverage I feel I must immerse myself in, I have yet to write or indeed play anything for this blog. As this is an important daily thing, and because my entire willingness to do it will doubtlessly shatter the moment that I fail, I had better find something to do quickly. Something I can quickly play and dismiss without anybody bothering due to a sheer lack of artlessness. Something published by a big corporation, probably with mobile phones in mind and then put out on the PC at an inflated price simply because the market dictates that PC games should be more expensive than phone games.

Oh look, I have yet another iBomber game. That'll do nicely.

iBomber Attack is the black sheep of the iBomber Family. Whereas the other two games are tried and true (or should that be tired and bruised) tower defence games, Attack is instead about driving a tank around Third Reich-occupied locations shooting Fritz in the face and stealing his ill-gotten Nazi gold. The game plays as something between a twin-stick shooter and a vehicular combat game with the arrow keys or left analog piloting the tank, and the mouse or right analog aiming the turret.

Tank battles in Attack are quick and brutal. Whilst the game gives the player plenty of health pickups and a decently thick layer of armour, the computer likes to play with sheer numbers, so it's not difficult to get overwhelmed by a massive number of foot soldiers equipped with various weapons, turrets, tanks, artillery or even warships bombarding you simultaneously. The key, therefore, is to keep moving, to bash your way through as many buildings as possible, to keep shooting and to keep collecting whatever gold you can from your fallen foes and their conveniently placed supply crates so that you can upgrade your tank with a selection of different abilities and secondary weapons between levels.

Unfortunately, Attack takes its wonderfully destructive nature and turns it into a thankless grinding task. The player is scored, amongst other things on their destruction, with the more buildings flattened during a mission the better. To make this worse, the only way the player can gain an extra life is to collect five intelligence crates in a single level. As intelligence crates can be anywhere, including inside destructible buildings, the only way to stockpile extra respawns is to actively go systematically crushing each level, leveling every building in sight until the five crates are found. This slows the game down somewhat, sapping a lot of the fun out of the otherwise brutal tank battling.

And it is, rather unfortunately, rather repetitive. Whilst there's a certain sense of escalation to events, the game's formula never changes enough to give it any sense of long term appeal. A battle in the desert is pretty much the same as a battle on a dock is pretty much the same as a battle through a french village. Sure, some of them may be timed, others may require the player kidnap an enemy scientist or general, but it's all just the same drive round and shoot everything until it stops shooting back.

So iBomber attack is better than the other iBomber games, but that's a pretty low bar to begin with. Whilst there is definitely some entertainment value in this low-budget blow-em-up, and it has a subtle sense of humour that the other games in the series sorely lacked, it still feels like a basic paint-by-numbers game with very little personality and not much in the way of style or design. It's nice, but it's not good, and I certainly couldn't stomach playing it for more than a couple of hours.