Reviewed on: Nintendo Switch

Paper Wars brings smartphone and console games closer together

It’s funny how the mobile games industry and the video game industry have drawn closer and now trade influences. Only a few years ago there were debates about one cannibalizing the other, but today smartphones are seen as just another platform, and there is room for everyone.

Paper Wars: Cannon Fodder Devastated is a Nintendo Switch exclusive that looks like just another of the many casual smartphone games… But don’t be fooled, the game surprises with its content, its fun and the subtleties of game design that make it more technical and deeper than so many other little phone games.

Mechanics: 9

The basic premise of PW:CFD is quite simple: you must aim your cannon and blow up battalions of the enemy army, stopping them from crossing the battlefield. On top of this Tower Defense-style proposal, the developers at iFun4All added countless good ideas to increase the game’s complexity and depth… And there are so many that it is easier to simply list them all:

• Your shots do not hit the target immediately: you must take into account the distance between the cannon and the enemy, trying to predict the soldiers’ movement and aiming a little ahead.
• You need to hold a button for a few moments to fire your shot. The longer the charge time, the bigger the explosion caused on impact.
• Power-ups appear on the battlefield throughout the game and you need to click on them to receive their benefits, which include slowing enemies, multiple shots and even triggering an air strike that hits everything on the screen.
• If the explosion of one of your shots hits an uncollected power-up, it is destroyed and you also suffer a serious penalty: a few seconds unable to fire a new shot.

Combining these small ideas, the result is a very fun experience of surprising strategic depth – the kind of thing that can consume hours without you even noticing!

The game has traditional controls, using an analog stick to move the crosshair and a button to shoot (which must be held down to charge the shot and released to fire it)… But the experience is infinitely better and smoother when played in handheld mode using the Switch‘s touchscreen.
Touching the screen immediately starts charging the shot, and lifting your finger from the screen fires. This setup gives you much more flexibility and agility, letting you play better and reach more challenging and interesting levels.

Fun: 10

Paper Wars is a dangerous game: you can lose hours in it and not even realize it!

The game has 3 campaigns of 20 levels, each with 3 difficulty options. Each game mode presents a small variation on the basic formula, whether limiting the number of shots or presenting more numerous hordes and forcing you to choose which ones you will have to let through.

With each level, you feel the improvement in your skill at predicting enemy movement, aiming correctly, making the most of your power-ups and decimating countless enemies with a single shot. You feel a constant desire to test yourself on the next, more challenging level, and try to improve even more.

There is also a Survival mode, which imposes a limit on how many enemies can get through and tests how far you can go, how long you can defend yourself.

Understanding that the simple controls mask the game’s depth increases the pleasure of beating a challenging level. Not to mention how enormous the satisfaction is of executing a single shot and devastating dozens of targets!

Audio and visuals: 6.5

Paper Wars‘ simple gameplay would be fun and interesting with any style of presentation, but the game could be even more appealing with a different art direction. PW:CFD presents itself as a war scene imagined and drawn by a child: soldiers, tanks and even the explosions look like very simple drawings made by the hands of someone very, very young. The idea of using this look is even interesting at first, but it ends up becoming very tiresome very quickly.

The music still works well. Although a bit repetitive, the soundtrack is not tiring and its little marches manage to convey the feeling of an imaginary war even better than the infamous drawn images.

Final thoughts

Paper Wars: Cannon Fodder Devastated is another of those precious jewels hidden in the Nintendo Switch eShop. Its unpretentious style and casual pastime look fool the unwary, hiding a quite polished, interesting and very fun gameplay experience.

Score

Fun = 9

Mechanics = 10

Audio and visuals = 6.5

Overall: 8.5

Played on the Nintendo Switch version