The premise and gameplay in War Grimoire HD is simple. As with any tower defence game, you are a group of “goodies”, having to defend your tower/castle/kingdom/whatever from a group of “baddies”. Each unit has a monetary cost to purchase and place it onto the field, and defeating enemies earns you cash, as well as power-ups, to increase your number of troops and their strength. It is trying to find the balance or purchasing and upgrading units, their placement, 
and having a bit of hindsight that will win you the experience points and weapons at the end of each level. The player chooses the desired level from the book-like game hub. Here you can upgrade your weapons and character, and play around with equipping up to sixty unlockable weapons across the six available character classes. These include Warrior, Archer, Mage, Knight, Dragon and Flaming Tower of Death. No, seriously. Flaming Tower of Death. Yup. Imagine Lord Sauron if he could shoot fiery magic balls from that great glowing eye of his. That would have made for a much swifter conclusion to that particular tale…
Anyway, I digress. I will admit that maybe I am wearing rose-tinted shades with this game, or at the very least a rose-tinted monocle. I have been raised, from an early age, on a fibrous diet of Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics, as well as the proteiny goodness of Advance Wars and C&C, so this game already gets three gold stars and a gentle tussle of its hair from the get go. What I will chide the game for is the transition from tablet to mobile. I wound up playing this game on both iPad and iPhone 3GS, and I have to say that despite the wrist ache, the iPad version wins it for me, by a broadswords-width. It is just clearer having it on a larger screen. Enemy placement fares better, and generally I find myself making less mistakes with unit placement. You can sell a unit if you place it incorrectly, to reclaim 75% of the unit’s cost, but on the iPhone it became a case of just laying extra units to help cover the ones in the right place, if you still have the funds of course. Each level has a number of waves of monsters, including a handful of boss enemies thrown in for good measure.
Scoring takes on an Angry Birds feel, in that 3 Stars is the aim, and is achieveable, but the scoring itself is up to some great unknown Number Deity who, apparently, has better things to do that to justify not giving you higher scores for wiping out every enemy with a mere handful of units and a bit of luck. If a single enemy gets through your defences you immediately drop to two stars, but you do not need to get three stars in order to earn new weapon upgrades or new levels. There are four modes to play through, Easy, Normal, Hard and Infinite, respectively. Having not really played a true Tower Defence game for some years, I stuck to Normal for the first few levels, but found myself growing accustomed to it quickly. Don’t be fooled though. There is a steep difficulty curve, which will punish a player for either not grinding to achieve more EP to upgrade units and weapons, or for not properly upgrading the right units and weapons at the right time. Handy hint: Archers are you friends on the early run-throughs and levels, so get them maxed out asap.
