Sensei Wars Review

When you read about an iPhone game titled Sensei Wars you automatically label it as your typical action game, or at least I did right off the bat. Thankfully it's a lot more than that as the world building and fighting game gives you enough tasks to keep you constantly busy for hours to come.

Sensei Wars starts off with a short cut scene as you see a young version of the main character flee his hometown when it's attacked by Mongols. The warrior of the town is defeated and it's left in ruins, but the sole survivor, our lead character, hasn't forgotten what the Mongols have done to this land. In an instant he's a bearded older man, a trained warrior who grows in skill as you progress. It's rather easy obtaining a number of achievements in Sensei Wars, considering that there are so many tasks at hand. The most obvious one is rebuilding his hometown, not for the character's sake but to line your own virtual pockets with gems and coins. The more you keep the town up-to-date with specific buildings, the more money you're given as a reward. But you must make sure to keep the defenses up, especially since those evil Mongols will be coming back to wreak havoc on your blossoming little town. Make sure you keep updating the main warrior as you level up. His particular skills become rather handy later on.

That leads us into the most entertaining portion, and that's the battles. In some ways the mechanisms of these battles are very reminiscent of the old PC game Lemmings. You click on the warriors that you've trained, then they go off and break down the walls and burn down the buildings. Now, I understand that they hate the Mongols, but that's one hell of a strange lesson to send to whatever youngsters may be playing Sensei Wars. It's the equivalent of telling kids who are bullied to do the same things back to bullies, but that's just me heavily reading into a simple game. Either way it's really easy to get your warriors through each battle, especially since you have so many on hand (at least 20 or so).

What continued to frustrate me throughout the gameplay are the small buttons on the screen. The buttons to go to different sections, but every once in awhile it's difficult to poke away at them because a regular finger is a few times larger than the buttons on the screen. And be careful with the buildings in your little fictional town. If you start messing around with adjusting your view you may find yourself easily moving one of your buildings to a completely different area. It's a problem I constantly fell into once I started spinning around the screen to get a different angle of the town. As long as you keep your fingers at least some-what outside of the town confides when you're spinning the screen around, you should be fine.

Perhaps the best or worse thing about Sensei Wars is how easily you can breeze past through the first few levels. An hour after I downloaded the game I found myself halfway through the 4th level as my main character's virtual world expanded on my phone. there are a couple of challenges, mainly having to do with continual upkeep in such a short amount of time, but not too much after you pass a few levels. It naturally gets a little more difficult as time goes on, but when I hit a level past 5th I really want more obstacles to keep me planted on this level even longer, just to have me really earn that next spot up.

There is no denying that Sensei Wars still has enough virtual stimulation to keep your attention for a fixed amount of time, but the screen viewer hiccup and lack of real difficulty makes it tough for me to keep this game on my phone for much longer.

App Store Link: Sensei Wars for iPhone & iPad | By 2K Play, Inc. | Price: Free | Version: 1.1.79371 | 65.9 MB | Rating: 9+