Zen Wars Reviews
4/5 rating based on 51 reviews. Read all reviews for Zen Wars for iPhone.
Zen Wars is paid iOS app published by Patrick Wolowicz
Great Game—A Genuine Tribute
Mitchismo
It's a faithful Rampart reinterpretation and fully 64Bit/iOS11 compliant. An instant classic.
Nice idea hosed by an idiotic design choice
Chip H.
Somewhere underneath a stack of flaws there's some good game ideas here. Unfortunately, the otherwise solid game ideas are overwhelmed by poor design choices to the point there's going to need to be a lot of post release dev love if this game is going to be anything more than okay. The chief flaw: all the strategy and smart choices in the world can't stop you from losing to purely random elements you have no control over. Yes, the random "tetris" like blocks add some challenge to the base building, but the maps are too small to make the mechanic anything but frustration more often than is acceptable. It's common to encounter scenarios where you have to find only one or two of the many possible block shapes to close your base perimeter but, since you can't discard unusable blocks, you lose (or, if you can somehow spam the unusable blocks into the ever shinking open space until you do get the block you need, you're setting yourself up to lose a few rounds into the future). That right there kills the game for me - I can have all the spatial relation skills of a genius architect and the tactical sense of Sun Tzu, but when there's only a buffer of 3 squares between my castle and the edge of the map, I will frequently be forced into a no-win scenario through the randomness of the blocks offered for repairing. How did the asinine nature of this not get brought up during testing and how was it not addressed? I can think of multiple things that would alleviate the frustration without changing the core game design: bigger maps with more room to build so you can get rid of unusable blocks, a choice of 3 or 4 blocks so the odds of you having a playable block is increased, a limited number of discards per round, etc.. There are plenty of other flaws, just none as bad as that part. - "Sleeping" units in your territory: if the sleeping units were there at the beginning of a mission and a fixed quantity you could deal with they would be fine, but they continually spawn throughout each game. There's no strategy or tactics to them because of this, they just keep appearing no matter whether you successfully prevent the enemy engineers from building to your territory or not. Worst part is that because building a block over them wakes them AND causes the portion of the block built to disappear, they wind up exacerbating the problem of random blocks forcing you into a no-win scenario. - The controls - how hard would it have been to have a left and right arrow to rotate the blocks? Instead we've got some weird wheel where touching it in the center allows you to drag the block and touching the outside allows you to rotate the block. It's a terrible UI design because when you're zoomed out you can't control which the game interprets your actions as. - Speaking of zooming out, the game continually insists on zooming in automatically even though for 90% of the game you can't play any way but mostly to fully zoomed out. With only scant seconds for many of the round portions, you can't be wasting time on fighting the auto-zoom. Pros: - Amusing, well presented campaign. - A solid, core game of base building and base defending - Decent multiplayer Cons: - Unforgiving random block mechanics force you into losses with no way to avoid - Controls that require far more futzing than is acceptable under a stopwatch - Auto zooming for no reason other than to make you waste time adjusting the camera - Annoying enemy spawns in your territory with nothing to be done about it Conclusion: If the devs were to spend some time polishing this game, this would be an excellent strategy title. In its current iteration, however, I could not recommend it to anyone as the negatives overshadow the positives.
I missed Rampart
DRaes
Ah, the good old days of gaming. I spent hundreds of hours playing Rampart and this is a great rendition of that game. Does it have flaws? Sure... But show me a game that doesn't.
Awesome
Papa dd
Grab this now! It's an awesome mix of strategy and puzzle and is super fun and addicting! Plus it's online and the price is too good to pass up :) This is rampart done right! Thanks liv games and subzero. Back to playing
Crashes upon loading
exsul2
Never have actually played the game because it crashes every time it gets to the main menu screen on my iPhone v4.1.
Great fun
mikev1077
Turn based strategy with some real time features. There are 3 parts to every turn. Build and rebuild your fortress. Next you place your weapons. The last part of the turn you and your opponent select targets for your cannons in real time at the same time as your opponent. ***Multiplayer*****
Wow!
Plouffedaddy
I thought this was going to be like Legendary Wars, but it's totally different and not what I would have expected.
I like!
yr120
Very nice! I can play game with other player in GameCenter,and I like the beautiful picture!