"Gunner Guy" is on par with "Ranger Chick", though a little better at multiple targets. He's the only character with an innate Bomb attack (though a bomb spell can be learned), his multi-target fire/lightning abilities require less AP to learn, he's the only one that can buff/restore accuracy, and his heal also cures status effects.
The biggest thing you could do to improve the game would be to include some sort of auto-attack. There's no reason to have to keep selecting the same basic attack every round. Perhaps that changes on some of the later levels, or is planned for the sequel. Right now the game mostly isn't difficult enough to require round by round input.
For anyone having problems with the gold star on Level 1, here's how you do it.
First off, you'll need a bit of luck. You may need to restart a couple of times (although I didn't). Deploy all your units to South Europe. Now, this is the luck part: on the first turn, send units to attack both Ukraine and Middle East. You need to capture both on the first turn, so restart until you do. It *may* be possible to do this without Ukraine, but you'd need extremely good luck; better to get luck out of the way in the first round.
After that, it's straightforward, since you'll be getting 10 armies a turn. Always put them into your main army unless otherwise noted. Turn 2: Capture India. Turn 3: Capture Siam. Turn 4: Capture Indonesia. Turn 5: Capture New Guinea and Western Australia, splitting your forces as needed (keeping in mind there will be five extra armies on the field). Turn 6: Capture Eastern Australia.
My general end-game strategy works like this: grab the first two ship upgrades, then buy the two best loot upgrades and whatever weapon you can afford. This is the most important part, since you'll need the loot upgrades to gain enough money for the rest, and weapons to kill faster. Pick up the third ship upgrade and then the highest flag you can (or sails, if not great at dodging) before the second boss. You can downgrade your lower level loot upgrade for a little extra money (levels covered by flag). You should also upgrade weapons as possible. For the third/fourth boss, when they appear (and not before) sell your loot upgrades and buy the rest of the flags. If you want more speed, switch the lowest level flag for sails.
A lot of the unlocks don't just need the right rider (very frustrating when you can't see stats) but also need significant investment in points, especially in Flip. Also, a couple of the mini-games aren't worth even trying until you max Mini-game (Lava, Pizzaroids).
There really needs to be a way to check what the unit types do aside from when they become available. Maybe I'm just missing it, in which case it needs to be more blatant.
This game has a great concept, which makes the glaring flaws with it more pronounced:
1) Ranged support is necessary for the cavalry and infantry, and there's only one way to get it. If you don't get it, you're screwed.
2) Getting 4-combos is necessary, but happens too infrequently. I agree with the comment that six colors is too many for such a small board.
3) Speaking of colors, the switch board itself is difficult to look at; everything blends together because the colors are similar and the designs are muddy. It needs a lot more contrast, and definitely a new selection of colors.
4) The in game advertising automatically gets it a 1/5 rating. I don't mind it on the title screen, but after beating every level (after six)? Intrusive and unnecessary.
Not a bad game overall, but helicopters are ridiculous. Not so much the luring, though that's hard enough on a map like Brighton. In order to lure them into signs, you need to basically stay in front of the sign, leaving you open. Then, there's almost always cars under the signs, so then you have to choose between getting hit repeatedly or hitting the car and going who knows where. In short, they're too difficult, and it brings down the enjoyment of the game.
The game itself is fun, as most of the rest of these games have been. The art was great, again, as is wont to be the case in these games. However, the story was ridiculously stupid and actually took away from the game.
For a perfect game on Basilica (the one with only eight towers), the trick is that you can sell the starting towers. Sell all but one, and you'll have just enough to upgrade the one tower to a sniper. From there, build a fire rate boost and damage boost on the sniper, a slow tower with max range boost, and a second sniper.
Note for 80x: If you're going fast enough, you can actually "skip" over most of the jumps.
My one complaint is that I wish the distance to the jumps was shown the same as the gates. It throws off the timing since you don't know when exactly they'll show up relative to the gates.
I was originally going to give this a 5/5, but knocked it down to a 4/5 for a couple of reasons. The grappling hook controls are very frustrating, and only seem to work well at all on high speed. Sometimes I double jump when I thought I had tagged the ground; very frustrating when you fall in a pit expecting to be able to double jump. This seemed especially true after grappling. Also, I found the game much more difficult running at normal speed versus high speed. This was mostly due to grappling, and not enemies - holding down C basically ensures you'll kill them all.
I really wanted to like this; I loved the first one. Unfortunately this doesn't come close to being as well done. In particular, the kitty cannon is extremely aggravating.
Some of the levels, even the intro ones, are highly dependent on luck. Repeating the same clicks doesn't always net the same result. For example, level 7, clicking the upper left car I've had it hang on the edge, fall off the ledge, and have both the car and beam fall.
While I don't disagree about Ninja Champions being ridiculous, they are completely able to be dealt with. A lot of dealing with them has to do with your tower setup and mana strategy. Crypts can still scare or freeze them if they hit first and Burning Temples will hit them when cloaked if they are triggered. If you know a wave is coming up, conserve your mana for Meteor, which will still hit them.
You won't get a Brilliant on a level with Ninja Champions without leveling up Meteor or getting very lucky with Crypts, end of story. That's kind of the point though - it's *supposed* to be difficult to get them. Until you have a strategy to deal with them, you won't get the perfect rating.
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