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Tactile Wars

Tactile Wars is an online strategy war game on mobile devices with cute brightly colored graphics, a base to customize, tons of defenses, traps, and upgrades to unlock, strategic, arcade-like combat, PVP, and a leaderboard ranking system.

Publisher: Ankama Mobile
Playerbase: High
Type: Mobile Strategy
Release Date: August 14, 2015
Pros: +Strategic, arcade-like combat. +Lots of base customization. +Tons of defenses and upgrades to unlock.
Cons: -Repetitive gameplay.

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Overview

Tactile Wars Overview

Tactile Wars is a 2D online strategy war game developed and published by Ankama, the creators of the popular, tactical PC MMORPGs, Dofus and Wakfu. Choose one of 6 colors and wage war against the other 5 color factions. Customize your base with a huge variety of defenses and traps that can be unlocked as you level up. Attack enemy bases and lead your troops to victory in real-time, strategic combat. Move your troops by tapping the screen and draw shapes to change their formation. Place defenses in your base such as mines, tanks, turrets, and mercenaries to stop potential invaders. Upgrade your troops and climb the leaderboard which consists of four Leagues. Experience a paint-themed world with cute graphics and visuals. Lead your troops to victory in this online strategy arcade game.

Tactile Wars Features:

  • Color Factions – Join one of 6 color factions (Blue, Green, Orange, Red, Pink, and Purple) and wage war against other colors to take their gold and climb the leaderboards.
  • Adorable Graphics – Cute visuals with a colorful paint theme that appeals to both children and adults.
  • Real-time Combat – Fight through enemy bases with full control of your troops’ movement, formation, and battle strategy.
  • Large Arsenal of Defenses – Unlock tons of traps, artillery, support, troops, and base upgrades including mines, turrets, upgrades, mercenaries, tanks, and more.
  • Base Customization – Customize your base with a large variety of defenses and traps and place them strategically to shut down enemy invaders.

Tactile Wars Screenshots

Tactile Wars Featured Video

Tactile Wars: trailer

Full Review

Tactile Wars Review

By, Herman Y.

Tactile Wars is a free-to-play, 3D online strategy war game developed and published by Ankama, a French game developer and publisher behind the popular PC MMORPGs, Dofus and Wakfu. Tactile Wars is somewhat similar to online strategy city-building games like Clash of Clans and Game of War but yet very different. Unlike the latter games, Tactile Wars has a more hands-on battle system that is arcade-like and easy to pick up and play. Tactile Wars features adorable visuals, interesting combat mechanics, and a base-system with tons of defenses, traps, and upgrades to unlock. Tactile Wars launched worldwide on August 14, 2015 after a brief soft launch testing and reached over 100,000 downloads one week after its release. Tactile Wars received the Apple App Store Editor’s Choice Award which greatly boosted its popularity as well as crashed its servers for several days. With many unique features and intuitive gameplay, Tactile Wars is a fun mobile game to try out despite some repetitiveness.

Join the Color War
Tactile Wars features a faction system and players can join one of 6 unique color factions. These factions include: Blue, Green, Orange, Red, Pink, and Purple. The faction system is interesting and gives off a sense of war and unity among the different factions, although players in similar factions will almost never interact with each other. Players can attack players in other Color factions and loot their bases, but cannot attack players in their own faction. Players are placed into Leagues based on their ranking and defeating other players will raise their rank on the leaderboard. The game has very cutesy graphics that is suitable for children as well as adults. The color theme is unique and blood is portrayed as color splotches that can splatter on the floor as well as on troops. War is messy.

Your Personal Base Camp
Each player gets their own base in Tactile Wars. It is similar to a city in online strategy games such as Clash of Clans and Game of War, except there are no buildings. Your base is basically a map that other players will have to fight through if they choose to attack you and vice versa. Because every faction is in an all-out war with one another, players must place defenses in their base such as landmines, mercenaries, turrets, and more, in order to protect their gold and ranking. Players are limited to how much defenses they can place in their base by space limits and budget limits. Each base has a limited amount of space to place traps and defenses (which can be upgraded to create more space) so players have to choose the best traps/defenses to place at the right spots. Bases also have a budget limit that players can increase as they level up. Each trap/defense uses up a certain amount of budget points and players cannot surpass their budget limit. Once the base is set up, enemy players will have to maneuver through your territory in order to defeat you, and you will have to fight through their base to defeat them. Traps and defenses can be destroyed/used up so players will have to regularly purchase more to replace them.

Fighting Through Enemy Territory
Tactile Wars is a purely PVP game so players will have to attack other player’s bases in order to level up and obtain gold. Attacking bases are asynchronous in that both players don’t have to be online at the same time, rather, players attack enemy bases that are controlled by A.I. (but the bases’ defenses are laid out by the actual player). Once in an enemy base, players are placed on a map in which they can tap to move and change their troop formations by drawing shapes on the screen, which is a very neat feature. For example, your troops will take the form of a circle if you draw a circle or an arrow if you draw an arrow. Shaping your formation is useful in various situations to counter against enemy troop formations and for more effective positioning. Each base has two capture points, shaped as a circle, and players must capture both of these points in order to win. Each map is fairly linear in which players will capture a point, defend it for a bit, capture another point, defend it for a bit, and then win. Because of this, the game can get fairly repetitive since players will essentially do the same thing over and over again and there isn’t really anything to do other than to attack bases and place defenses in your base.

Combat
Unlike a lot of other city-building strategy games, players have a lot more control over the combat in Tactile Wars. As mentioned before, players can tap to move their units and shape their formations by drawing shapes. The game has a unique enemy troop design in which most enemy troops have a flag-bearer and killing the flag-bearer will create a bubble that players can press to instantly destroy the enemy squad. Due to this instant-killing mechanism, the best strategy would be to position your units in a way such that you can kill the flag-bearer first, therefore eliminating the entire squad as quickly as possible without casualties. Killing enemy squads fill a “Reinforcement” bar on to top right and when the bar is full, players can summon reinforcements to join their squad. Players will lose the battle if all their units die. The combat is fairly fast-paced and strategic but the game does get somewhat repetitive as mentioned before since most enemy bases look the same and players will basically do the same thing in each battle. Base layouts and combat strategy do get a lot more varied at higher levels after players unlock more unique defenses and traps.

A Large Arsenal of Defenses and Traps
Tactile Wars has a huge number of traps, artillery, support, troops, and base upgrades to unlock. Traps include mines, geysers, trapped slabs, and tesla antennas, Artillery includes turrets, tanks, cannons, vannons, and robotanks, Support includes powerups, mercenary upgrades, and reserve upgrades, and Troops include trackers, snipers, bunkers, and heli-towers (with even more defenses in development). Players can also unlock and purchase extensions to their territory (more spots to place defenses and additional bases) and increase their budget limit. The large arsenal in Tactile Wars adds a great amount of variety in customization as well lot more depth and strategy. Various defenses can be unlocked in the research menu and each item is level-locked so players must reach a certain level before they can unlock it. Due to the large item level gaps, most players won’t get to access or see much defensive variety until much higher levels. Each defensive item serves a certain purpose and placing them strategically in your base makes a huge difference. After unlocking an item, players will still have to purchase them as each item is consumable/destroyable and has to be constantly bought and replaced.

Cash Shop/In-App Purchases (IAP)
The in-app purchases are very simple in Tactile Wars. Prisms are the premium currency and the only thing players can buy with Prisms is in-game gold, which can be used to purchase more (consumable) troops/defenses to place in their base. Gold can also be used to unlock items in the research menu once players reach the minimum level. All items are still level-locked so paying money cannot unlock things early but having more gold is always good in case other players attack your base and you need to purchase more defenses. Overall, spending money is not really necessary but can give paying members a slight advantage when they need some gold. Unlike a lot of other mobile games, the advantage of paying is fairly minimal and the game is not very pay-to-win. In addition to attacking bases and spending money to obtain gold, players can also watch in-game video advertisements for gold. There is also no energy system in this game so players can play as long as they want.

Final Verdict – Good
Tactile Wars offers a fun, new twist in the online strategy city-building game genre and features cute visuals, strategic, arcade-like combat, base customization with lots of defenses and traps to unlock, and reasonable in-app purchases. The game can get fairly repetitive due to linear map designs, but Tactile Wars is still a decent game to play both casually and hardcore that gets more interesting at higher levels.

Screenshots

Tactile Wars Screenshots

Videos

Tactile Wars Videos

Tactile Wars: trailer

System Requirements

Tactile Wars System Requirements

Minimum Requirements:

Android 2.3 and up / iOS 7.0 or later

Music

Tactile Wars Music & Soundtrack

Additional Information

Tactile Wars Additional Information

Developer: Ankama Mobile
Publisher: Ankama Mobile
Platforms: Android, iOS
Release Date: August 14, 2015

Tactile Wars was developed and published by Ankama (Ankama Mobile), a France-based game developer and publisher behind the popular PC MMORPGs, Dofus and Wakfu. Ankama is most known for their colorful, manga-inspired artwork, humorous content, and tactical gameplay. Tactile Wars launched globally on August 14, 2015 after a brief soft launch, and reached over 100,000 downloads on Android and iOS one week after its release. Tactile Wars won the App Store Editor’s Choice Award which resulted in so much popularity that their servers crashed for several days. Ankama Mobile (also known as Ankama Games) is also the publishers of the mobile games, Call of Cookie, a turn-based castle defense game, and Dofus Battles, a tower defense-RPG hybrid based on Dofus.