Stellar Wars Sucker-Punches You With Cute Robots Before Putting You To Work [Review]

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Stellar Wars

Its title may sound like a Star Wars-based mockbuster by The Asylum (the studio that brought us Sharknado and Atlantic Rim), but Stellar Wars, a new iOS title out now from developer Liv Games, is actually the followup to 2011’s megapopular Legendary Wars. Only this one takes place in space and stars a bunch of cute robots.

Stellar Wars by Liv Games
Category: iOS Games
Works With: iPhone, iPad
Price: $1.99

So it’s off to a promising start from that alone.

Once you get over the cute overload from those little guys, though, Stellar Wars reveals itself to be a complex, surprisingly deep melange of a bunch of different game styles that shouldn’t work together, but then they totally do.

Just expect to have to work for it.

If you’ve never played Legendary Wars, it was an interesting mashup of tower defense, real-time strategy, and action role-playing game, and Stellar is no different other than its science-fiction setting. Sometimes it plays like Plants vs. Zombies, and sometimes it feels like Command & Conquer.

It is also, inexplicably, a side-scrolling space shooter because sure, why not?

The premise of Stellar Wars is that a small group of refugee robots intends to rebuild its society after moving to a new solar system. They need resources to do this, so they start mining for ore. The ore lets them build more robots, and those robots go out, fight monsters, and collect more ore so you can upgrade your robots so that they can fight monsters and collect ore more efficiently.

The console commands take a bit of getting used to.

The controls for the main, more tower-defense-y, real-time strategy-ish levels where you’ll be spending most of your time are simple: You have three “lanes” in which you can deploy robots to move across the level to fight and mine until they are destroyed. You can issue group commands, control them individually, and activate special powers with single taps, and once all the monsters are dead, you win.

The console commands take a bit of getting used to, however. I was never quite sure if I was ordering around one robot or all of them, and the icons aren’t always self-explanatory. You read how to do everything in speech windows that appear once, so if you’re not quite paying attention, you might not be able to make the most of all of the game’s features right away.

Regardless, Stellar Wars is a challenging, charming strategy/action/shooting title that will keep you busy and entertained for quite a while.



Stellar WarsGame Name: : Stellar Wars
The Good: Deceptively deep, plenty to do, and adorable, adorable robots.
The Bad: Learning curve is a bit steep, and icons are a little vague.
The Verdict It’s a good combination of genres that comes together into an addictive title with an impressive level variety.
Buy from: App Store

[rating=game5]

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