If you are a fan of strategy, “shoot ‘em up” games such as Plants vs. Zombies, then you will enjoy playing Ionage. This free app takes the player on a series of intergalactic missions to destroy the enemy force’s power core by building multiple platforms, turrets and other forms of weaponry to defend your station.
Ionage does a great job of immersing the player into the game and helping a novice pick up the game quickly with walkthrough tutorials and links to Ionage’s forums when you are first playing. With intimate features such as inbox messages to keep you briefed on every step of your adventure, you feel like you are a part of the game. Another interesting feature in this is the ability to access the game’s forum. In my experience of playing strategy games, it is a rarity to see a link or tab leading you to a game’s forum site within the game itself. Although you will have to create a free account once you enter the forum rooms, it is very helpful to players who want to get an edge in the game by using tips, hints or cheats. Speaking of gaining an edge, if you are one of those players who are impatient with saving up game currency the “old fashioned way” by playing the game level by level, you may opt to purchase “badges” for $1.49 each and accessing and buying more weapons and special abilities to conquer the game quicker.
This game has multiple missions and gets progressively tougher with each additional mission you endure and will definitely make you think by throwing curveballs at you. You can even indirectly increase or decrease the game’s difficulty by adjusting the “game speed”, located in the Settings tab (represented by a graphic of three faders). The graphics are solid, runs smoothly and does not take up of a lot of memory space on your phone as this app is only 98MB large, even though Google Play will prefer you to download it via Wi-Fi.
Overall, Ionage is a good test of strategy and multi-tasking, although it will take a while to master this game even with the tutorial and can get a little boring to play if you are not engrossed with the story line.
