I love the feeling of finding an obscure game that turns out to be a hidden gem. With how indie developers are publishing games on the App Store, it is a particularly great place to look for gems, as long as you’re willing to browse through a lot of games that… well… aren’t gems. To spoil this review just a little bit, the latest gem I’ve stumbled upon is Cannon Crasha, by Gangogames and Fabraz. It is a real-time strategy game where you defend your castle with an enormous cannon.

Your castle stands in direct opposition to another castle on the other side of the screen. Both castles are equipped with cannons and several special rooms: the armory, engineering room, forge, and wizardry. Your task is to destroy the enemy’s castle before they destroy yours. With the ever-changing wind direction in mind, you must adjust your cannon’s angle and power to aim at the enemy castle. As you dish out damage, you’ll earn gold that can be spent in the rooms to perform various tasks like summoning armed units, repairing your castle, or casting spells.

I’ll be perfectly honest; I was attracted to the app’s great icon and then turned off by screenshots that seemed cheesy. It sounded fun though and the entry fee was only a dollar, so I went for it. Once I was able to open the app up and see it in motion, all my hesitations melted away. The pixel art is definitely unusual, but it is so full of charm that it sucked me in before the first level ended. The presentation also includes hand-illustrated comics between worlds and humorous dialogue between levels that serve to tell the story. The story is goofy, but it’s funny and I really like that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The basic premise is that you, the cannoneer, are helping King Weaknix defend his land from the encroaching castles being built all over by King Galbatorix. Weaknix points out that Galbatorix bullied him throughout their time at king school.

You’ll be crashing Galbatorix’s castles across 40 single-player levels and 4 different worlds. His castle has all the same features as yours, so you’ll have to adapt your strategy to his. This game would have been so easy to mess up and make every single level feel basically the same. Instead Gangogames have done a marvelous job of adding lots of variety to the campaign. As you progress, your castle will take on different layouts that protect some rooms better than others, leading to different defensive strategies. There will be some levels that have unusual situations you must adapt to… such as a stage where your castle is heavily damaged and the objective is to survive for 3 minutes or another where the wind is blowing full-force against your castle the entire time (the opportunity for Weaknix to tell a fart joke is not missed). Other levels will change the game mode entirely, and instead of facing up against an enemy castle, you must take on waves of monsters. Monsters are much smaller targets than castles, so the strategy for success changes dramatically.

Any single match is full of variety too. Crasha is not like other launching games where you simply find the perfect combination of angle and power and then just keep making the same shot over and over until you win. The wind direction changes frequently and has a significant effect on your cannonballs. A windsock atop each castle and subtle particle effects indicate the wind’s current state. This keeps you constantly engaged in the game and also makes cannon-shooting require quite a bit of skill. I felt myself improving constantly and it felt awesome when I got good enough to enemy flying units with some consistency.

The castles and cannonballs are solid objects. When cannonballs collide with each other, they will interfere with each other’s flight paths and when cannonballs collide with castles, they’ll do damage and take a chunk out of the castle — all of the castle’s walls are destructible. If enough of a single room has been removed, it will become unusable. You can cripple your opponent’s rooms by targeting them over and over again, but aiming that accurately takes a lot of skill! You will also definitely be hitting your own castle on occasion, strong winds and enemy cannonballs can really mess up your shot. The wind and collision physics can work in your favor too, of course. A good physics engine and a depth of strategies means some cool moments are bound to arise. I had a particularly great moment when I blocked an opponent’s fireball (an expensive but powerful shot) with my own standard cannonball (free).

Let me cover the special rooms real quick so the rest of this review can make sense. The armory lets you train armed units. There are five unit types and each serves very different purposes. For example, soldiers will only target enemy units while orcs will only target enemy castles. The engineering room is primarily defensive and lets you do things like repair rooms and erect steel beam walls. The forge lets you buy special ammunition for your cannon. This includes the aforementioned fireball, a cannonball that splits into many little cannonballs, an iceball that freezes enemy units, and a homing missile. The wizardry has the most variety in its purpose, its spells let you turn enemy units into weaker frog versions, change the weather (the resultant weather changes based on which world you are in), summon an extremely powerful dragon, or generate money. The money generation spell causes you to generate gold every few seconds for the rest of the level and can be purchased up to five times to improve the generation rate. Your cannon does take five seconds to recharge between shots, so you will have small bits of “down time” to manage your rooms.

Your opponent has all of these special abilities too, and they’re balanced well so that every strategy has an effective counter-strategy. If your opponent could do nothing, the best strategy would probably be to max out your gold generation and then save up for the dragon so she shoot a flurry of devastating fireballs at your opponent’s castle. However, your opponent will be very actively fighting against you, so you will almost always need to take on different strategies to defend against his attacks. Ground units are very hard to target with your cannon (its lowest angle points slightly upwards), so you’ll need to get some ground units or aerial bombers to take them out. If your opponent is furiously flinging fireballs at you, you’ll probably need to take a more defensive approach and put up some steel beams. It’s really exciting and dynamic.

All that great real-time strategy going on against the AI can be played in multiplayer too. If you’ve got an iPad, you can actually play castle vs. castle on the same device (online multiplayer is coming to all devices soon). If you’ve got an iPad and a friend to play with, I can only imagine that this is an extremely fun competitive game. The intensity of making the right tactical decisions while reacting to your opponent’s offenses would make this a great pick for competitive hardcore gamers. I also think all the silliness that naturally ensues from the charming pixel art and humorous physics would make it a hilarious light-hearted experience as well. Imagine the wind shifting so you shoot your own castle with a fireball but then firing off a rain of frogs to transform all of your opponent’s units into amphibious counterparts.

There’s a lot more to this game than the campaign. A great music selection is an interesting blend of chiptunes and orchestral music. The game is absolutely chock-full of video game references including an elderly Mario as the shopkeeper. I’ve picked up on references to some 25 games including Banjo-Kazooie, Doodle Jump, Doom, Final Fantasy, Minecraft, Mortal Kombat, Pokémon, World of Goo, and Zelda. The game also features other game modes: Free Play lets you play single, custom matches against the AI; Survival pits you against endless waves of monsters and bosses; and Goal Hunt is 30 especially challenging objectives to pursue, such as winning a game without the armory or hitting an opponent’s cannonball with your own five times in the same match. There’s a huge depth of content and it’s all available for only 99 cents.

Any mode you play will reward you with the game’s two currencies: Dragoons and gems. Dragoons can be spent on powerful consumable items that can be used in the battlefield. Dragoons can be purchased via in-app purchase, but you’ll earn plenty through standard gameplay and the levels are perfectly beatable without the consumables. Gems are used in the Vanity Shop to unlock aesthetic items. Every unit in the game, your castle, and parts of the UI can be customized with many different skins. A few skins are unlocked through in-game achievements, but most are purchased with gems. Again, gems can be purchased via IAP, but you’ll earn plenty through standard gameplay and the items are aesthetic only. An item doubler (doubles any consumable you purchase) and gem doubler are also available for $3.99 apiece. The amount of coins and gems offered per dollar is very reasonable.

I’d be remiss to complete the review without mentioning any flaws. This game isn’t perfect, but it’s clearly been made with a lot of love. I have just a few complaints, all of which would be easy to fix with an update. The first couple are balance issues, the money generation spell can be purchased multiple times to improve generation, but the spell costs the same each time, so the first level is the hardest to get and the last level is the easiest. It seems like it should be the other way around. Also, the steel beams that you can place anywhere along a certain arc around your castle can get in the way of your own shots. This follows the game’s internal logic, but it seems weird to me that placing my steel beams around my cannon blocks my shots more than it blocks my opponent’s. I can shoot through the steel beams if I really want to, but that kind of defeats the purpose of putting them up in the first place. Finally, the split ball is unaffected by wind after it splits. This might be intentional on the part of the developers as it makes the ball useful in high winds, but it doesn’t really fit the game’s physics and it looked weird every time. Those are nitpicky complaints, but that goes to show what there really is to complain about. There were moments when I was frustrated with the cannon’s lowest firing angle, but I learned that I needed to adapt my strategy and use more troops.

This is a gamer’s game. In so many ways it feels like the developer’s love letter to video games — not only because of all the great humor and references, but also because it feels like they made the game they wanted to play. The dedication to the game shows, and I can best describe it as a game with a lot of heart. Quirkiness abounds, but it sticks to the story and theme. Beneath all the silliness lies a deep and challenging real-time strategy game that requires quick thinking and skill. You won’t be grinding your way to success — you’ll actually need to improve your strategy and cannon-firing skills. You can feel yourself getting better and that’s a great feeling. The screenshots really don’t do this game justice; if you’re ever going to gamble 99 cents on a game, here’s your opportunity. Take my word for it, there is a ton of good content here and Cannon Crasha is an absolute steal at $0.99.

iTunes Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cannon-crasha/id653132309?mt=8