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Athenion might not have the pedigree of some other deck-building card games available for mobile, but that shouldn't put you off. This is a game that's packed full of bright ideas, fresh new gameplay modes and enough content that you can lose hours of your life to.

Battles take place on a 4×4 grid, and see you taking it in turns with your opponent to lay down cards. You draw up to five cards from your deck of forty at the start of every turn.

These are the units you're playing in the fight, and they range from hulking monsters to flighty fairies, from magical trees to fearsome undead dragons.

Your cards have arrows on them that you show you which direction they can attack. You'll also notice a bunch of other numbers on the cards. These let you know the hit points a card has, how powerful its attack is and how many soul points it grants you.

Those soul points let you attack your opponent and they're the key to victory. The first player to lose all of their own hit points is the loser.

There's a lot more going on than that though. For one thing you need to pick from one of six different factions before you even get to the fights.

These factions have different strengths and weaknesses and figuring out which of them best suits the way you want to play is the first step of a pretty long journey.

Different factions have different special moves as well. Some let you link together cards to make them more powerful, others are all about sacrificing weaker units to create pockets of dark magical energy. One lets you build giant rock walls that you can use to protect some of your units or power up others.

There are single-player challenges, regular events and much, much more as well. You're never short of something to do in Athenion, and the pace of the matches lets you get a lot of them in in a single setting.

The Good

There's a staggering amount of depth to Athenion. It's going to take you a good while to get to grips with the basics and once you've done that there are layers and layers to peel back. Every time you win you'll figure out a new strategy and every time you lose you'll be trying to find a way to right that wrong.

The game looks amazing too. The cards all sport a brilliant anime art-style and you'll want to collect all of them just so you can check them out. The speed of the fights is a massive plus too – they deliver huge chunks of tactical action in the sort of short-blast sessions that are perfect for mobile play.

On top of that there's a brilliant community to the game, and you never have to wait long to find an online battle. There are a number of different modes that let you practice with different decks, take part in intriguing events and fight it out in ranked and casual multiplayer matches.

The Bad

There's a pretty steep learning curve here, so if you're not in for the long haul then you might be better finding your card-based fun somewhere else. Even when you've got the basics down you've still got a lot to learn and it can be punishing to come up against an opponent who knows more than you do.

There are also a lot of currencies, crafting materials and other rewards to figure out. The game does tell you what they do, but the tutorials are pretty brief and you're left on your own for a lot of the time to try and get to the bottom of things.

Overall

Athenion might not be the easiest game to understand, but once things start clicking it becomes something really rather special. There are some brilliant ideas here and they're woven into a bright tapestry of gorgeous visuals and wonderfully paced mobile play.

It won't be to everyone's taste, and it's fair to say that some players are going to put it down before they've even got to the good bits, but this is one CCG that it's well worth sticking with.

8.2

OVERALL

Replayability 8.1

Game Controls 8.2

Graphics 8.7

Sound/Music 8.2

Gameplay 7.8

FREE

Athenion: Tactical CCG

ZERO-bit Company Limited

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Caravan War could easily have been the name of a segment on "Top Gear" in which the presenters destroyed a caravan every week in increasingly ostentatious ways. For better or worse, Caravan War is not a game about destroying caravans. Well, it is. But not that kind of caravan.

Viewing the action from an isometric top-down perspective, you have to fill your little world with buildings – a Headquarters, for conducting trades, a Mill, for producing stuff to trade, an Academy, for training guardians to protect your cargo, a Garage, for storing vehicles, and so on.

Then you have to create more buildings and upgrade the ones you have. To keep the wheels turning you have to trade, which means creating a caravan that can survive a journey through the fantasy badlands, and send out convoys whenever you've got enough cargo to sell.

It also means ambushing the caravans of other players, to steal their gold and cargo. But to pull off an ambush, you need a good number of well-trained bandits and a selection of souped-up towers to place in your enemies' way, in classic tower defense fashion.

And the only way to get an army of well-trained bandits is to upgrade your Tavern and your Bandit Camp and keep earning achievements so that you can get hero cards (and gems.)

Oh, and you should probably complete a few campaign missions to unlock that new tower so that you can nab some extra cargo and make enough money to buy a new weapon for your caravan.

And so on and so on.

Caravan War is an interesting take on the casual strategy genre that's richer and more involved than many of its stablemates.

The Good

Caravan War is a rich and detailed tower defense management game mashup where you're always balancing different priorities to keep your little fantasy empire thriving.

Whereas a lot of free to play strategy games hold your hand to a ridiculous degree, slapping a red sticker on every upgrade or unlock that becomes available so that you never have to use your judgement, Caravan War largely leaves you to do the rounds of your little kingdom alone.

And there's a lot to check. Not only can you upgrade your buildings but you can give promotions to your Guardians and Bandits, and tweak the formation of your caravan, among other things.

Your progress never stalls due to the free to play nature of the game. Even after you've completed the campaign missions, you can avoid an unmanageable confrontation by skipping to the next target caravan every time you send out a scout (for a small fee in gold).

The Bad

While there's nothing particularly wrong with the visuals, the 2D isometric graphics can look a bit dated on a device that's capable of gleaming polygons. The design of the world is generic, and the text is sometimes illegibly small unless you zoom in to read it – even on a large smartphone.

This all takes the shine off an otherwise exciting mashup of tower defense and management, imprisoning a novel concept in the staid uniform of a much more ordinary game.

If you can look past the game's ordinary appearance, you'll find a rich and rewarding free-to-play strategy game underneath – but you shouldn't have to look.

The Verdict

Caravan War is an interesting take on the casual strategy genre that's richer and more involved than many of its stablemates. The gameplay contains enough different threads that you always have something to do, and the difficulty is only ever as challenging as you want it to be.

Unfortunately, a slightly drab appearance detracts from the overall package, and there are more exciting alternatives in the App Store. But if you don't mind putting up with generic visuals, there's plenty to like in Caravan War.

7.6

OVERALL

User Interface 8

Lasting Appeal 8

Does It Well 8

iPhone Integration 7

Is Engaging 7

FREE

Caravan War

Hiker Games Joint Stock Company

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