It's Time To Lead Your Tiny Troopers To Victory

Tiny Troopers 2: Special Ops ($0.99) by Chillingo Ltd is a squad-based shooting game that will put you right in the middle of the fight. Do you have what it takes to lead your squad to victory?

The first thing that impressed me the most with this game were the graphics. Seriously, they’re just gorgeous. All of your squad units are beautifully detailed, from the mission briefing screen and to the battlefield. Animations in Tiny Troopers 2 are incredibly smooth and fluid, and I experienced no lag whatsoever during my play. The sounds are also pretty realistic, as you will find out when you’re duking it out against the enemy troops.

The controls are entirely touch-based. You move your squad by tapping on the screen to direct them where they should move to. You can swipe your finger in a downward motion to make them get down for cover, which you will end up having to do quite often if you want to survive. To attack enemies, you just need to tap on them and your units will begin shooting, and it’s recommended that you move around while attacking so you are harder to hit. To use your special weapons, such as rockets, grenades, and more (you’ll find these on certain levels), you just have to drag the item from the slot on the right side of the screen onto your target, and your squad will fire. The game features intuitive touch controls so that it’s incredibly easy to pick-up-and-play.

Checkpoints are indicated in green, so you’ll want to make sure you go towards them to save your progress on longer missions. There’s also a green compass indicator to help direct you towards them, which is helpful. You can also pull up a map from the bottom left corner if you want an overview of where you’re supposed to go as well.

During battle, you will see health bars above your units’ heads, and the same will apply towards your enemies as well. Fire at your foes until their health bars are depleted, but make sure yours don’t get depleted either, because then the mission ends and you lose your progress on it.

The game features three special operations, and each will have their own set of missions for players to undergo. You won’t have access to the other operations until you clear the first one, so it’s all linear. Each mission will have a different objective, such as eliminating all enemies, rescuing hostages, destroying towers, and more. The difficultly level for each mission can also be changed between three settings (I’m assuming): Easy, Normal, and Hard. This is great, as it allows the player to choose the difficulty that is best suited for their gaming style. However, you’ll have to unlock the difficulty levels by eas

Completing missions will earn you gold and command points. Gold can be used to get new skins for your troops, as well as powerful upgrades to make them stronger in battle. Upgrades include increased damage, better accuracy, longer attack range, and more. Stronger special units can be recruited to your team as well, such as Grenadiers and Airborne. Command Points are used to call in air strikes and other unique abilities that will level the battlefield when you are struggling. However, be careful to not die, because you will lose some CP for each death.

Of course, if you don’t have enough coins or medals, and you really want some upgrades or air strikes, then you can always buy more through in-app purchases. I don’t really condone this kind of practice, though, especially since this is already a paid game to begin with. But hey, the freemium model just seems to be taking over everything, so what can you do …

There is Game Center integration for leaderboards across the Zombie levels (you’re going to have to unlock these), and there are 26 achievements to obtain. So yes, replay value is high here.

This is a fun game that should strike the fancy of any warfare game fan, or just anyone who likes action-packed shooting games that require a bit of strategy and skill. The visuals are the best part of the game, and is the icing on the cake.

However, while the touch controls are pretty intuitive, I got frustrated with them at times. Because everything is about touch, I often found my fingers in the way of seeing what was happening on screen. I would prefer to move around with joystick controls, because it’s uncomfortable to me to keep tapping around to move, or just drag my finger across the screen to make them continuously run. And tapping on targets to shoot is easy, but sometimes the targets can be pretty small and it becomes difficult to quickly tap multiple ones when you’re also being attacked and trying to avoid dying.

I was a bit disappointed to see that there was no other option for controls in the game. Hopefully the controls can be further optimized in future updates, or the developers could include other alternatives that are also easy-to-use.

Besides that, though, the game is still fun and enjoyable. I recommend picking it up if you like a shooter mixed with a bit of strategy. Get it in the App Store as a universal app for $0.99.