Pocket Troops is a game for mobile devices in which you train a variety of troops to battle other players across the world.
This game features four different forms of "currency"; Money, stars, coins, and time. Money and stars are earned by winning battles with your troops either against the AI for smaller amounts, or by winning battles against other players. Coins are earned by watching ads as they are available which can easily be done without too much effort while doing something else. Time is spent by training troops; as they increase in level, it takes more time for their training to finish.
There are six types of troops which can be found in the game and a bonus troop which can be recruited once.
- Sniper: This unit does high damage with a high chance to land a critical strike with each shot. Their downside is a low amount of health, making them easy to kill with splash damage. Their high damage however, makes them a critical unit in most any group.
- Shotgun: This unit is capable of doing a large amount of damage, but has low range. Most battles tend to end before the Shotgun can get into range, however this unit has easiest access to grenades which can still make a large impact in each battle.
- Assault: This unit is your standard assault weapon-carrying unit who gets to the front of a fight quickly. If any unit is going to die in a fight, this one will be it because he'll be the easiest target to hit. The Assault unit becomes quite important at later levels as it has access to the taunt ability, giving the rest of your group a greater chance to survive.
- Assassin: This unit has abilities to get in close to the opponent's group quickly which can cause incredible amounts of havoc. However, if you lack the proper amount of training or abilities, the Assassin tends to fall flat in usefulness.
- Commando: This unit uses machine guns with low accuracy, but many shots in the same turn. The Commando can do lots of damage in one turn without the need for critical hits, but tends to fall off when there are more targets to shoot at.
- Explosives: This unit is a high-damage splash damage character with low health. Similar to the Sniper, the Explosives unit seems to be a pretty important unit when needing to do lots of damage. The downside is how easy it can be to damage your own units if in close-combat.
- El Commandante (Bonus): This unit I think tends to take the place of the Assault unit. Someone to get to the front of a fight quickly and take the brunt of the retaliation. I'm not really a fan of the high cost required to unlock this character, though it's not impossible without buying the coins using your real money. When using this unit in battle, you get increased money and star rewards for winning battles.
Things to keep a player interested in playing on include daily islands with a few battles to play each day and a sort of tournament kind of thing which starts anew at the beginning of each week. While these help, as time goes on, the game does tend to get a little bit dry in my opinion.
The biggest reason the game gets boring over time I think is a lack of differing strategies in the game. While there are some changes to your group you can make depending on what enemies you're attacking, the general strategies tend to remain the same and the biggest factor into whether a battle is won is really more dependent upon the levels of the units than any type of strategy.
So I'll give this game 7/10. It's a good game, it kept me busy for a long amount of time. I think it just needs more diverse options for strategies to make it a REALLY amazing game.
~ Kyle
