Destroy The Enemy Color In Cubemen, An Action-Oriented TD/RTS Hybrid
Cubemen ($3.99) by 3 Sprockets is an action-oriented 3-D tower defense and real time strategy hybrid game with simplistic graphics and complex but easy to grasp gameplay. This was originally a PC game, but it’s been beautifully adapted for the iPad.
Its red little men vs. blue little men in Cubemen and it’s your job to utterly annihilate the enemy team with faster thinking, quicker movement, and better strategy.
You can play Cubemen in one of two ways - skirmish or defense. In defense mode, this is a traditional TD game, but your towers are your cube-shaped minions who defeat the enemy cube-dudes. As in all TDs, you have a variety of men with different abilities. Some are ranged, some are melee, and all need to be used properly to keep the tides of war in your favor.
Your cubemen cannot be upgraded, but the quick gameplay compensates for this. Destroying enemies rewards you with a steady stream of cubes, which are used to create new guys. You can place your men anywhere on the board and they remain stationary until you move them, so proper placement is the key to winning.
Levels are cleverly designed in different cubed arrangements, and range from easy to insane with elevated towers, bridges, and floating platforms. The gameboard is in 3-D and fully rotatable, which makes the TD portion of Cubemen quite fun.
There’s also a skirmish mode, which is designed for players to play against one each other in multiplayer match ups or to play against the computer AI. This mode is a continuous tower defense game where both you and your opponent build towers and have a steady stream of minions attacking one another. This is a lot of fun, and a welcome change from typical tower defense games.
The game has 26 defense levels and 20 skirmish levels, so there’s quite a bit of gameplay here. Since its multiplayer, you can play time and time again without getting bored, and there are also plenty of achievements to earn. All in all, it’s a good amount of content, but I still think it’s overpriced.
My main complaint is that the graphics are overly simplistic and not exactly visually appealing, but the fast-paced skirmish style gameplay makes up for that lack. I also noticed quite a few spelling errors, which was really distracting, but a quick fix with an update.
Overall, I’d say that if you’re a tower defense fan and you’re looking for something unique, you should give Cubemen a try. It’s not the best in the App Store, but it’s a lot of fun and it will keep you busy.
