This week, we’re looking at a game that heavily borrows from Advance Wars and a more turn-based RPG approach to tower defense.
DOFUS Battles (iPhone, iPad): Online games DOFUS and Wakfu have their fans, and largely don’t have much of a following from the mainstream. Projects like this game and the Wakfu XBLA title are attempts to change that, giving players a taste of the experience without the daunting multiplayer arena that is the main experience. As a standalone product, this one’s interesting: it’s tower defense, but instead of towers, you have specific units with classes like archers and healers. We like the completely turn-based aspect: between waves, things stop and you can spend whatever you’d like, and it doesn’t rely on placement while enemies are rushing in. (That isn’t so bad, really, but there are enough games out there to cater to those who prefer it.) READ MORE
Swords & Soldiers (iPhone, iPad): We loved Swords & Soldiers in its initial 
Allied Star Police (Universal): PopCap’s 4th and Battery label has released a few completely-free iOS games now, and they’re usually great fun, if a little evanescent in scope. This one’s no different, except the design was done by a Make-a-Wish child, Owain Weinert. Don’t get us wrong: kid’s got skills. 
Kard Combat (Universal): Hothead, once on our radar largely for their work on the Penny Arcade games and, more recently, the DeathSpank titles,has taken lately to releasing lots of smaller projects on the iOS platform. Kard Combat, their latest, seems to combine Magic: The Gathering‘s element-based mechanics with Mortal Kombat’s aesthetic. By that, we mean they did exactly that. The campaign is a tower of increasingly-difficult opponents, everything is dark and bloody and full of glowing eyes, and yeah, for some reason we have a bunch of unnecessary K-for-C substitutions. Oh, and they hired Richard Garfield, Magic‘s creator, to co-design the gameplay. (We’d be impressed if he hadn’t guest-starred like this more often lately.) 
