Seller: Rodeo Games

Platform: iOS 8.0+

Size: 840 MB

Price: $2 + In-apps for cards

Tyranid Invasion is a (I think) direct adaptation of one of the Warhammer 40K boardgames. You play Space Marines of various types fighting the Tyranids (kind of like Aliens) in a series of scenarios.

This is a turn-bases game. You have a team of five Marines (chosen from your current pool) and have a scenario objective. During your turn you move your Marines in any order. They have four movement points:

1. *1 to move 1 square
   

2. *1 to fire most weapons or do a melee attack
   

3. *2 to fire heavy weapons
   

4. *+1 to attack when in Overwatch mode
   

A lot of the strategy is moving your guys up to fire at Tyranids then retreat with their last movement point. Then the last couple of Space Marines move up and go into Overwatch to fire at incoming Tyranids.

A Marine is of a type: melee (pistol and melee weapon), shooter (rifle weapon), support (heavy weapon). Marines can only wield weapons according to their type. A Marine also has a faction which, along with their type, determines the special powers they can buy.

Marines get experience for killing Tyranids and completing missions. If they die they lose any accumulated experience. After a scenario you can spend experience points to level up or buy a special ability for the Marine.

After each scenario you also get a card which is a random item or weapon. After a campaign (set of four scenarios) you get a pack which is four or five cards, one of which is a new Marine.

The scenarios have a good amount of variety and you can redo them at the same or different difficulty level (three difficulty levels). After the initial melee-attack Tyranids later scenarios introduce others: shooters, heavy shooters, BFG shooters and flamethrowers.

Graphics are good. It's a 3D view and you can move the camera around. When you tap to move a Marine the game shows you movement range and fire range and visible in-range targets are highlighted. Sounds are appropriate but sparse, though they do have narration and the Marines have conversations.

These guys also did Warhammer Quest and ultimately Tyranid Invasion suffers from many of the same problems.

The UI is slow and the bad guys movement is slow and it makes for a game where you wait in short enough increments that you can't switch to another activity but long enough to be annoying even when the Marine moves form one space to an adjacent space.

Marines kind of feel the same. They get more differentiated as you buy powers but powers are very expensive so your Marines get better very slowly, which gets worse if you want to level everyone up as you collect more and more Marines.

After a while the scenarios do get kind of the same. Terrain is unique in each scenario and the objectives and OPFOR differs. But it's still a game of move, attack, overwatch.

I think what I'd need to do is play the same five Marines all the time so it feels a bit more like an ongoing story. Not sure I can summon the will to play this game again. Still, it did provide 20+ hours of play before I got tired of it and I only played 12 of 40 scenarios.