Developer Summary

Finally the war of paper tanks comes into your room! How long can you hold the defenses against paper tanks. Build your towers of paper before they get out of the box and make a big mess in the room. Manage the turrets, upgrade and be careful where you put them…every decision can be fatal! Watch out for the air units, they have a different route! Amazing gameplay with incredible number of levels. Simple yet hugely addictive game.

What We Think

The tower defense genre always struck me as a strange offspring of the real-time strategy. In my younger days I’d spend countless hours in Command and Conquer or Age of Empires just building impenetrable fortresses and watching the helpless AI throw wave after wave of troops at my ever growing wall of turrets. So when I saw the early tower defense games I just saw a more organised form of something I’d been doing for years. Interestingly, however, the genre has morphed and changed in many ways since its beginnings and we’ve seen everything from third and first-person action tower defense to tower assault games. It’s into this arena that DQ Team have stepped with their quaintly themed War in a Box: Paper Tanks.

Paper Tanks is a classic example of tower defense; the player is presented with a level featuring a set track going from one side to the other (generally winding along the way). A convoy of enemies will meander along this track with the aim of reaching a goal at the other side and it is your job to ensure that this does not happen. To facilitate this objective you have access to a selection of defensive towers that can be placed at specific points across the level. Finite funding limits your ability to place and upgrade towers and you can increase your money buy making kills.

In terms of gameplay Paper Tanks doesn’t stray too far from this formula, adding only a few twists of its own. Your foes range from the titular tanks to planes and zeppelins which cruise over the level on their own, separate route. In this, at least, Paper Tanks differs from some tower defense games as you must plan for air units taking an alternate route to ground based enemies. The game also includes some interesting physics as the wreckage of a broken vehicle can temporarily shield the units behind it.

Beyond this Paper Tanks doesn’t make any great strides in gameplay; ground based enemies are limited to armored cars and tanks while air units are simply planes of varying strength and zeppelins. This lack of variety can also be seen in the tower choice; you can select from a general multi-purpose heavy gun that can attack all enemies, a cannon for specialising against ground units, a flak battery for the air, artillery for ranged bombardment and a tesla tower that slows ground units and damages air units.

Thankfully Paper Tanks has one more trick up its sleeve to keep us interested; a particularly unique graphical style. As you likely discerned from the title, the tanks you’ll be battling are made of paper, and so is pretty much everything else in this game. From the trees to the planes, the environment is made exclusively from various shades of brown paper, giving the game a fairly distinct look.

The presentation of Paper Tanks is also of a high standard; the menus and briefing screens are attractive and the gameplay itself allows for zooming into the battlefield or pulling out for a top-down view. You can even see the perspective of each of your towers as they smash up the incoming enemies. All in all Paper Tanks looks excellent, as long as you don’t mind the papery aesthetic that the developers have gone with.

The sound and music is of a similar quality, using a combination of tense, war-themed music and sound effects ranging from sirens to cannon fire as your turrets lay low your enemies. Unfortunately a lot of the sound is lost when the game is sped up to x3 speed (something you will likely do often) and so it becomes largely irrelevant. Nonetheless, the aesthetic and audio quality of Paper Tanks is impressively high.

Ultimately DQ Team have done a good job of putting together a strong tower defense offering with an interesting aesthetic and a high level of presentation. Unfortunately Paper Tanks doesn’t do anything particularly innovative with its gameplay and basically offers more classic tower defense action with a new look. If that is what you’re looking for then Paper Tanks delivers; well over twenty levels and an expert mode provide a healthy amount of longevity. If you want something new, however, there are definitely more interesting alternatives out there.

Get War In A Box: Paper Tanks for iOS

Visit the official site at warinabox.com

[xrr rating=”3/5″]