Small Wonders brings us a puppet battle game in the sort of standard gain ground format. Starting at your puppet headquarters create puppet warriors and send them into battle against an opponent. As you go you will take control of checkpoints that you can then upgrade and produce new puppets from.

It’s pretty basic. You’ve got a handful of puppet types that include both melee and ranged that you can send across the stage to crush the enemies and their puppet factory. It’s very much like Slug Wars but with only one line of battle. After a couple stages you will find a strategy that works fairly well and you shouldn’t have a problem succeeding.

Every level is the same from the gameplay standpoint. A side-scrolling level that requires you to slide your finger back and forth from factory to action once your puppets start taking ground. That is a little on the annoying side as it doesn’t always register what it is you want it to do. I’ve also found that a balanced attack between the basic melee and ranged puppets will almost always succeed without an afterthought. In fact, you can almost exclusively alternate between basic melee and basic ranged and win on the easy levels.

When you upgrade a control point it acts as a barrier that the enemy must break through in order to continue forward. Eventually you run into more difficult levels where the only control point is on the enemy side of the level and you have to get there. This sucks as there’s a time limit on each level and the as the level difficult gets higher the timer gets lower it seems. That means you must do more with less and in less time. A lopsided affair to say the least.

However, on those levels the goal is, generally, just to survive so you don’t have to get all the way to the other end of the level.But also the enemy seems to get the jump on you and can be on your doorstep before your units even get out of the factory. In fact, before you even have one puppet, they will have three standing there.

To combat that you get some professions, which are essentially special powers. They do various things like blind and freeze your enemies, speed up your puppets, etc. Proper use of the powers can quickly turn the level in your favor and it is essential you learn to use them.

The graphics are pretty cool with a sort of paper cut-out style that is fresh for an iPhone game. They obviously took some time in the art creation and it shows. There are several types of puppets that you can create and fight against including Japanese ninja and Samurai, Roman Legions, Norse warriors and more. Along with that is a pretty standard set of sounds with squeaky death cries and a few songs that while not annoying, do tend to repeat a lot.

Overall it’s an interesting little distraction from time to time but not something that I would play continuously, perhaps a few levels at a time.