Star Wars: Battle for Hoth Review: Franchise Defense

App Name:	Star Wars: Battle for Hoth
Platforms:	iPhone, iPod Touch
Publisher(s):	THQ Wireless
Version Reviewed:	1.0.0
Genre(s):	Tower defense
Release Date:	July 7, 2010
Price:	$2.99

For fans of the Star Wars franchise, the appearance of a new Star wars game in the App Store is a reason to get excited. In Star Wars: Battle for Hoth, fans get to take on the duty of defending Echo Base from the Empire in a tower defense scenario. And while the game plays it safe with the genre, offering little new to TD games, it’s still a solid title that will please the fan base, but not impress fans of TD games.

As mentioned, Battle for Hoth recreates the fight for Echo Base from The Empire Strikes Back. Though the Rebels actually lost in the film, you get the chance to mount a better defense using all the weapons at the Rebellion’s disposal. You do so in the form of a TD game, that old stalwart of the App Store. In each level, you must build a series of defenses to repel continuous waves of recognizable Star Wars bad guys, including Snowtrooper, Tie Fighters, scout droids, and, of course, those iconic AT-AT walkers.

What Fluffy Logic and THQ Wireless have done here is to stick firmly with the conventions of the TD genre. They had a juicy licence and they took few risks. It has all the things you might expect: waves of enemies, predetermined paths, upgradable defenses, towers for air and land defense, etc. The only really permanent structures are trenches, which you’ll use for path-blocking (they also give a cover bonus to soldiers in them). So create a circuitous path, load it with firepower, and try to stop the enemies from getting to Echo Base. As far as TD games go, Battle for Hoth is very run-of-the-mill.

The only thing about it that might be considered non-standard, in that only a minority of TD games have it, is that you must deal with attrition in the  form of enemies that shoot back. And here, they do shoot back, and hard. This is absolutely in keeping with the movie battle, but it is also the most frustrating part of the game. The enemies seem to shoot as hard as you do, and so you spend as much time replacing defenses as you do building new ones. Thus it is very easy to run out of resources before you’ve built a sufficient force and losing the board. A little power-level tweaking here would be very welcome in a future update, so that losing troops isn’t quite so common an occurrence.

Battle for Hoth is a solid entry into the TD genre, but far from an innovative one. Its biggest draw is the Star Wars licence, and most people who buy and enjoy it will do so because it’s fun to build Rebel soldiers and Snowspeeders to take on Snowtroopers, Tie Fighters, and AT-ATs. The graphics get the look of everything right, and with music, sound effects, and even video clips from the movie, the game does a good job of evoking that Star Wars appeal. It is, in other words, much like everything else Star Wars: something you buy first and foremost because it’s Star Wars.

And hey, what’s wrong with that? Star Wars fans deserve a tower defense game, and Battle for Hoth gives it to them. While it won’t be winning any app awards WWDC next year, it also won’t disappoint the Star Wars faithful.

So if you’re a Star Wars fan, download Star Wars: Battle for Hoth and prepare for battle! It’s worth it. If you’re not into Star Wars but into TD games, though, you might want to give this one a miss, because it isn’t delivering anything that you haven’t seen before.

Our Score: 3.5/5

Star Wars: Battle for Hoth is available for $2.99 at the time of this review.

About the Author

Writer@Large Brian P. Hudson is an educator and freelance writer currently living in Dearborn, MI.

 

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