World at Arms is a new social enabled war simulator from Gameloft. It’s not a FPS or action style game. Instead it borrows elements from real time strategy games, time management games, and city building games. Now, because World at Arms is also a free-to-play game, that means that you’ll be restricted to not being able to do certain things unless you shell out some money for them with in-app purchasing. I know a lot of people hate this, but luckily, there is a surprising amount of things you can still do in the game without purchasing a thing. It just takes time and patients.

For starters, World At Arms seems like a city builder when you start it up. You will be in charge of constructing a base of operations, adding buildings as time progresses, and using these buildings to create your army of soldiers and vehicles. Like other city builders, you’ll need to create units that can provide resources such as energy, gold, and oil in order to sustain your operations. Now, like any other free-to-play game, you can either patiently collect these items, or just buy then flat out with the in-app store with real money. Now, this is where the time management portion of the game kicks in. Anything you build has a specific time it takes to complete. It could be a few minutes, it could be hours. For example, let’s say you want to train some soldiers. Click the barracks, then tap on what kind of soldier you want to train and then just wait until it is completed. Again, it could be minutes or hours depending on what type of units you are training.

Once you have a strong enough force of soldiers and vehicles, you can enter the campaign mode which allows you to battle it out against enemy forces. There is a huge story behind the game – mainly the US is being attacked by the KRA (made up) and basically you need to push them back and defeat them. Combat consists of you choosing a missions, then choosing which of your units you want to use to engage the enemy. You’ll want to choose your units accordingly to make sure they can defeat the enemy units. Each unit has  it’s strengths and it’s weaknesses. It’s similar to rock, paper, scissors in fact. If you don’t want to deal with any of that, you can always auto-deploy and let it automatically choose your units.

That brings me to one of my main issues with games like this. It’s not that the game isn’t fun to play, because it is. It’s that because of the time constraints and having to wait around most of the time for items to be trained or built, you’ll be playing this game for only a few minutes at a time or less unless you shell out a ton of real money. And with mobile games, especially on a phone, you really don’t want to wait around for things to happen or wait around until you have enough money to buy something. That’s the problem I think with all free-to-play games in general. Yes they are fun, but the waiting around makes me lose interest after a couple of days to the point where I just won’t check up on the game anymore.

On that note, if you are patient and don’t mind waiting around, World at Arms is a really great game. It has a lot to offer in terms of gameplay with a little bit of everything thrown in. RTS lovers should enjoy it, as well as those who like city builders, time management, even farming games. Elements of each of these are employed in World at War and it seems to do all of these quite well. In fact, there really is nothing wrong with this game, except for the waiting around but again, if you can be patient, you’ll find a really satisfying game here.

World at Arms is available now in the App Store for free. It is a universal app and is Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), iPod touch (5th generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 4.3 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5.

Description

LOCK AND LOAD! The United States of America is under attack from an evil alliance of highly trained forces known as the KRA. As the leader of the free world, YOU have to stand and fight. Build your military base, train your army, and battle against or ally with players from all over the world online in order to defeat the enemy for good!

World at Arms is the new ground-breaking social game by Gameloft!

– Enjoy the most beautiful war simulation on smartphone with outstanding graphics & animations, plus extra-realistic units & buildings.
– Engage in innovative, strategic and breathtaking battles across the globe, in the air and on the ground (desert, urban and snow), and unleash deadly power-ups to crush your enemy before he crushes you!
– Manage an extensive economy: Collect resources, build and develop a wide variety of units and buildings & upgrade your base to become the top superpower.
– Immerse yourself in a long, rich and dynamic campaign with more than 75 missions to complete!
– Take action and attack any player in the world, loot them for bonuses and climb up the leaderboards!
– Connect with your friends through Facebook or Gameloft LIVE! and borrow their units during battle to defeat tough enemies.
– Unlock loads of achievements!

[via App Store]

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