Metal Nation is a strategy game developed by Shanghai-based IDFSoft. In the game, players construct buildings, train troops, produce food, manufacture weapons and vehicles, and command in battles against all the enemies, including NPCs and real players.
Review:
Set in World War Two, the game involves players in confrontations against the Axis nations. Players follow the story quests, seize enemy posts, conquering cities after cities, and even come across with bosses in the battlefields.
The game turns out to be another mix of social and strategy elements. One needs to deploy farmhouses and farm plots for planting various crops. Many other structures must be built in order to produce the necessary units, food and other supply for expanding your territory and keep an advantage in battles. To that end, you build hangar, foundry, machine shop and a lot more. And to satisfy your soldiers and your crew, you even have to build bakery and ice cream shop.
If the little shops you add onto the land to any degree ease up the tense atmosphere in the game, the battles intensify it. Players don’t sit around and wait for the battle reports after training enough units, equipping them with weapons, and sending them to battles. They have to determine every detail of the battles, on their side. One fills the empty slots in the battlefield with different units, and in the turn-based battles determines whether a unit should attack on its own or wait and then unleash a joint attack at enemies.
As usual, the units, including vehicles, artillery, infantry, and aircrafts, sport different attack ranges and power and as a result, you might place them in your formation accordingly so as to deal more damages on the opposing side. However, you should also take into consideration more things than in other strategy games. Each unit comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. For example, the vehicles, including tanks, are more resistant towards damages and can easily destroy artillery, but at the same time, it is vulnerable to air attacks and it reloads at a very slow rate.
The controls in Metal Nation are mostly common as in many strategy and social games on iOS devices. You flip any structure and perform actions, say, upgrading or producing something. It is all convenient and satisfactory. However, there are still some problems. For example, since the size of the territory is limited, occasional rearrangements and dragging are just unavoidable. If you move a structure near the edge, chances are that you may not be able to see the action buttons, which will be hidden by the edge and you have to drag the map again to see and act. But the dragging is not easy. If you flip a road, you move the very road section your finger has been on rather than dragging the map for a better view of somewhere else.
Metal Nation offer a satisfactory combination of casual territory management and intense battles but it could have been better if the controls are more player-friendly.
MMORPG, MMO, Online Games for free
