Warzone Commander [4/5]
Side-scrolling strategy game based on a long-known genre of old browser Flash games. Dominate the field with your units before your enemy can do that. But at what price...
Do you remember the Warfare series? Or the Flash browser game Shadez? Warzone Commander follows in their footsteps — it’s a side-scrolling game where you deploy units and push the front line to take control from the enemy. It’s a decent experience overall, but the progression is slow, and the prices for speeding things up are absurdly high for a single-player game.
0. TL;DR
Developer: KhoGames
Release date: 8 Jan 2024
Genre: Wargame, Military Strategy, Offline, Singleplayer
Price: Free-to-play w/ MTX
Pros: Enjoyable gameplay, good-looking theatres of war, many units to choose from
Cons: Very slow progression, missions are pretty simple and short, abysmal MTX pricing
Download: Google Play
1. Gameplay
The gameplay in Warzone Commander is simple — units recruited by both the player and the enemy appear on opposite ends of a side-scrolling battlefield and march forward to capture strategic points. Soldiers automatically shoot and defend themselves, but they wait for a signal to advance past the current checkpoint (though they can also be set to move automatically via an option at the bottom of the screen, or if there’s no room near the current flag). Units are recruited from a pre-selected list, each with a point cost and a cooldown timer before they can be deployed again. The match ends when one side captures all control points, but your final score depends on the number of kills — so rushing isn’t always the best strategy.
There’s a wide range of units to choose from — 44 in total — including rifle infantry, snipers, rocket troopers, transport vehicles, light and heavy armor, drones, aircraft, and artillery. You can assign up to 10 unit types to your "deck," and additional slots unlock as you increase your rank; new units become available as you progress through the missions.
Although there’s a kind of balance between unit types — infantry beat infantry, vehicles beat infantry, tanks beat vehicles, artillery beats tanks, and so on — every unit can damage others, and I sometimes managed to win simply by spamming a single type of infantry that shredded everything in its path. You can also recruit a small transport vehicle with two soldiers inside, which speeds across the battlefield and can end a mission in just a few seconds. However, as I mentioned earlier, the game only rewards you with points for kills, so playing slower and allowing the enemy to advance a bit often yields better results.
Warzone Commander offers 20 visually distinct maps, each divided into 10 missions. Some missions allow you to unlock a new unit (which requires watching an ad before it’s added), and these units also become available to the enemy, gradually increasing the game’s difficulty. However, after several hours of play, I didn’t encounter any major difficulty spikes.
2. Visuals, Audio & Performance
The game was built with the Unity engine, though you wouldn't really notice—everything is rendered from a side-view perspective. The maps look nice, with beautiful gradients, and the units are essentially black silhouettes illuminated by distant lighting. Explosions and projectiles are visually impressive, and the atmosphere is enhanced by helicopters and artillery providing ambient effects. Having a flag of your choice waving over the initial strategic point is a very nice touch, too.
The music is passable—fairly generic and grandiose, in line with other games of this genre. It reminded me mainly of the Sudden Strike and Company of Heroes series. There’s not much more to say about it.
I didn’t encounter any performance issues; there were never enough units on screen for the framerate to drop below 100 FPS on my smartphone (except drops when ads were being loaded), and I did not observe the RAM usage go anywhere above 1.2 GB.
3. Ads & Microtransactions
The game—and more specifically, its developer—heavily relies on ads. These can appear in the menu on the sides or at the bottom of the screen, and a full ad block is shown every 2–3 missions. Unlocking a unit for use in gameplay requires watching an ad, which often lasts over a minute with no option to skip.
However, microtransactions are the worst aspect of Warzone Commander, and I seriously doubt anyone would actually pay to unlock a unit rather than just get it through regular gameplay. Prices aren't visible until you're taken to the Play Store payment screen, where they can range from £3 for a single infantry unit to £30 for a vehicle. And we're talking about individual units here. These are extremely high prices, especially for a single-player game designed to be played offline.
4. Verdict
Warzone Commander is a nice-done game for its genre. It doesn't do anything wrong, but it also doesn't introduce any new gameplay mechanics. It's simply a side-scroller built in the spirit of classic Flash games of the same type. It would easily be a 5 out of 5, but the slow unit unlocks, lack of variety in battles, and the outrageously high prices prevent it from reaching that score.