Warpips (2021)

Warpips is a 2D light-strategy game featuring a simple combat system. Its focus on simplicity makes it easy to learn, but it ultimately ends up holding the game back.

Warpips has a simple combat loop. Every battle features your army, and at the start, you have a limited amount of income, a small max unit count, and a lock on what units you can deploy. Whenever your army kills enemy units, your gain experience, which gives you points that you can spend on upping your unit count, upgrading your units, or on instant cash. This level resets each battle.

During each battle, enemies arrive constantly, but there are periods where enemy forces are more concentrated. Your goal is to ensure this loop of time periods doesn't repeat, as enemies gain a significant bonus if it does. What most battles will end up looking like are carefully defending your base and building up your economy before unleashing a large army all at once during one of the enemy's downtimes.

This actually ends up being a factor that makes the game relatively uninteresting after playing through the campaign. Every battle has this exact structure - start out weak, defend the base until a downtime between enemy waves, and then deploy as much as you can at once. Every battle has a same-y feeling as a result, structurally.

Besides this, though you can choose when to spawn units, you have an incredibly limited amount of control over them. All you have to command units with are a limited pool of Attack and Defend buttons that build up over time. Otherwise, units will always simply advance on the enemy, with nothing else for you to do, except occasionally make use of the Attack & Defend commands, which temporarily boost your units combat performance. There are "consumables" like rockets or drones that you can launch, and at least some of these allow you to specify what target you want to choose. There are also deployables things like sandbags, turrets, etc to bolster your defenses that don't count toward your max unit count.

Outside of each battle, there are a variety of units, but you have limited supply, so you'll often have to consider which ones you'll want to bring into battle. Usually, some combination of cheap early game units and some stronger late game vehicles make for a good choice. You'll also have to consider enemy forces - bringing units with anti-vehicle capabilities, or equipment to destroy fortifications.

The campaign mode on normal is pretty enjoyable. It's not too hard, and fairly enjoyable. Completing it will probably take 4-6 hours in total. I personally received the game on sale for $4 - I have to say, the full price of $17 feels a bit steep for this experience.

Despite me enjoying my brief time with it, a lot of my criticism for the game is how narrow its upsides are. The harder difficulties of the game are an absolute slog to play through, and they only bump the difficulty by sending more enemy units your way. The hardest difficulty, "General", is so absurd that it's practical unplayable and hardly of any interest. I wouldn't evene bother with hard, frankly.

The combat feels like there could be interesting depth to it, but it simply has none. Because the game restricts itself to the structure of having you start battles with no resources and slowly building them up, it effectively gives you only one real way to play the game. Hoard your units until the game tells you to charge in. Whereas in other strategy games, there may be valid reasons to either turtle up or play hyper-aggressively, there's none here. The enemy never has to build up defenses - they simply start with them all built. The don't have to develop units or an economy; they just have waves of units.

Because units don't have any abilities that you can control, all that really matters is that you pick appropriate ones to counter the opposing forces. And on top of all this, I kept waiting for a battle to introduce a new, interesting mechanic or something to keep me on my toes, but it never did - just the same gameplay over and over.

That's not to say the game doesn't have any positives by any measure. The art style combines 2D sprites and low poly 3D models with pixelated textures to form a surprisingly attractive final product. Many of the models look quite good, in all truth. The music is also surprisingly great - many tracks sound like metal or metalcore music with bit-crushed instruments jamming out, which suits the game well.

I also really liked the variety of units and utilities to pick from. The fact that the campaign battles consume a unit after their use means you'll have to pick different units throughout the campaign, helping you take advantage of the great variety in the game.

Ultimately, I'd give this game a 3/5, but I think that a sequel could easily stand to do even better with some changes to the game formula. The foundation that Warpips stands on is surprisingly solid - but to be worth playing any more than a few hours, it needs to shake up its mechanics and challenges to keep you engaged.

Playtime: 50 minutes (1 island conquered)

Review

This is one of those games where you have two bases facing each other and you spawn units to automatically walk to and attack enemies. The trick is to use the right units and items and get the timing right. Warpips is one of the better games i've played in this genre, but it is still not really my thing. It reminds me of Settlers 2, where it was always really frustrating that you couldn't directly control your units. So yeah, Warpips is only for people who can deal with that.