Templar Battleforce Review (iOS)

Role playing games have manage to become quite popular on the App Store thanks to titles offering simplified experiences, allowing less experienced players to enjoy them to the fullest. Alongside these games, deeper and generally more complicated games have also been released on iOS for the joy of all hardcore role playing games fans. Templar Battleforce, the latest game by Trese Brothers set in the Star Traders universe, is yet another of these deeper and more involving role playing games, a title coming with to a lot of interesting features and a well crafted and deep gameplay experience.

As mentioned above, Templar Battleforce is set in the Star Traders universe and features a pretty typical sci-fi story, with humanity searching for a new planet to inhabit following the Earth’s demise. During this difficult journey, humans are attacked by aliens known as The Xeno, marking the beginning of the game’s story and of the long battle the Templars will wage against the Xeno and other alien species. The Templar Battleforce story isn’t exactly original, being a pretty straightforward sci-fi story, but it’s definitely well crafted and enjoyable. The characters are also good and players will surely come to like some of them during the course of the game.

Templar Battleforce is a strategy role playing game where player and AI take turns moving single units on 2D battlefields seen from a top-down perspective. The game features over 40 missions where players have to complete a variety of objectives such as defeating all enemies, reach specific locations on the map, defend a specific units and more. The objectives are pretty varied so the experience never becomes dull or repetitive, with players constantly having to adapt to the situation and employ different strategies to win. Past a few beginning missions, which are pretty much tutorial missions easing players into the game, Templar Battleforce becomes quite challenging but never to the point of frustration: if you’re losing repeatedly, it’s because you’re doing things wrong.

Templar Battleforce features vast customization possibilities which allow players to create a lot of different unit types. In the Battleforce HQ players are able to improve their units’ stats and learn new abilities with the impressive Requisition Skill Tree. By unlocking nodes, players will be able to learn abilities, obtain weapons and gain access to new Templar classes which allow players to diversify their squad. These Templar Classes all come with unique abilities that spice up the experience considerably, like the Engineer and Scout classes, opening up new strategies. The Requisition Skill Tree is rather impressive but the huge amount of possibilities offered by it may be overwhelming and the fact that it’s not possible to get back all invested Requisition Points and use them differently can be limiting.

While the gameplay mechanics are very well done, the same cannot be said about the Templar Battleforce presentation. The maps are nicely designed and manage to enhance the game’s atmopshere considerably but they’re graphically dated. The same can be said about units, which fail to look impressive due to the limited animations. The mediocre presentation, however, doesn’t damage the experience all that much: players might be disappointed in the beginning, but once the game gets going, not many will pay much attention to the presentation.

With so much going on in the game, Templar Battleforce might be a bit hard to get into for those who have never played strategy role playing games. The game tries to ease players into the experience but things are so complex that very few will be able to use the gameplay systems to their max potential after the first tutorial missions. Some will probably give up at this point, and that’s a real shame. Templar Battleforce is one of the best strategy role playing games released on iOS in recent times, a challenging, deep and rewarding experience that can keep players  busy for quite a long time.