Codex of Victory for Android

Excellent hex turn based strategy game in the style of old Nectaris, with a LOONG single player campaign and a story that starts out Dune then takes a sudden turn to become Star Trek: Voyager. (Nectaris is like Great Little War, but in space.) Having just finished it on Normal, I can say it’s definitely worth the couple of dollars. There’s a good variety of units and maps, lots of unit customization options and the story makes the focus of the game change frequently, so you never have time to relax and get bored. The only gripes I have are: I bit of rough translation in the dialogue. The controls can get a bit rough when the isometric view overlaps with buttons/targets, so you have to be VERY careful and zoom to move them. The main currency trickles in so slowly and is used in so many activities that all other resources pile up and become unusable and you’re forced to do a lot more grinding of defense levels while it collects. Those defense missions do get a bit repetitive after a while. The AI can be REALLY dumb ignoring flying units sneaking through to snipe its HQ. Sometimes moving 1HP units around the map, especially to capture a city makes them inexplicably explode. Are there land mines? Potholes? Thumb tacks?? So you have to reset and use a more durable unit for not reason. When clearing a planet you have to be VERY careful not to tap on another planet’s province, even just to check the travel time, as this instantly takes your ship back into orbit and takes many hours to get back to where you were a second ago. So it’s better to clear a planet fully and lose a few provinces on another planet than try to hop between planets to defend them. Other than that, it’s a fantastic game.

The tutorial includes things like click with your mouse on the first screen. And gives so little info on how to play that one cannot even complete the tutorial.

War of attrition. While that is a type of strategy, it’s tedious and boring. Game continually shows things you can’t do until next turn. Shouldn’t be designed like that that I can see.

The game is built towards the numerical advantage not tactics. The enemy is a endless swarm that you have to eliminate quickly and often at close range. That way they can always counterattack and kill your unit. They enemy even has better versions of your units. Fully upgraded to deal more damage or have shields to prevent a attack. The is even a mission where the enemy hides artillery behind a wall not only shooting you at range but also getting a free counterattack on you every time you attack anything. And that's just the first act by the second this problem remains but the enemy also gains units to steal yours. What's worse is there is no cloud backup despite Game Center login. So if deleted out of frustration or boredom your save is gone and you have to start all over.

I really enjoyed playing this game. It's not always intuitive but very fun once you get the hang of it and, most importantly, no IAPs!