Friendly Fire! What We Think

We’ve all been lured into them before: Base-building games that, after you’ve played for a few hours or days, you discover that to progress any further you need to pay money to even stand up to anyone else at your level.

From Red Robot Labs, makers of Life is Magic, “Friendly Fire!,” has continually matched me against fair fights, as there are no pay-to-win mega tanks that will rip though your base unopposed. Instead, the only thing you can buy are construction time boosts and some resources. With no power advantage to unbalance the game, it has made Friendly Fire! the only base-building game I’ve stuck with over an extended period of time.

The War at Home

You build your base along roads, mines, oil rigs, research centers, and turrets, blockades and mines for defense. The roads are actually your neighborhood! When you begin it asks you to place your HQ at your real-life geographical location, so you are quite literally defending your home. Tanks and defenses follow a fairly simple system of strengths and weaknesses. Artillery can strike from afar, but are weakly armored and vulnerable to fast moving machine gun mounted jeeps. Tanks are your heavily armored bread and butter unit.

Sending your units against other player’s base is the main part of the game. You can have direct control of your tanks, but you don’t have to baby them as they have a basic AI that directs them based on their role. Destroying a HQ will claim you victory, but what you really want are their resources. Sometimes you only have enough units to go for one or the other, and while resources are nice, it’s hard to want to see a failure screen on the mission recap.

Satellite Fight!

Occasionally the game will host regional warfare where nations will fight for points, or the East and West Coasts of the US will have their own civil war. These make for nice alternatives to the usual random battles. Alliances or clans have recently been added and should add to the community aspect, uniting towns or cultures.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Speaking of towns, you can also search for opponents in your neighborhood, or even battle players in the next city over as the leaderboard is sort-able per Country, State, County, City. But if you want to be at the top of these lists, you need to make the destruction of HQs your priority.

[xrr rating=”4/5″]

Watch the Friendly Fire! for iOS Official Trailer