Boom Beach Review

BOOM BEACH REVIEW

Freemium base-building games are not hard to find on the App Store, but Boom Beach sets itself apart with an engrossing battle experience  rich with strategic choices. The idea is a kid-friendly mash up of Tom Hanks' Castaway and Saving Private Ryan experiences, in which you must build up your offensive and defensive forces and battle other players for resources. This constant switch in focus creates a level a depth that usually is only seen is much larger games, but Boom Beach is also guilty of slowing progress to a crawl with tedious resource requirements, and it manages to make me feel alone in its crowded seas.

 

Developer Supercell is smart enough not to break a proven formula: it took what worked in its hugely successful Clash of Clans and basically put a modern skin on it. Boom beach has the same high level of polish and an approachable design. A very simplistic, but effective tutorial gives you a clear and concise feel for the need to upgrade your base, and how it leads you to branch out from your base and attack the good variety of other player and computer-controlled forts scattered across your map of the sea.

Though not having direct control over your troops in combat is initially frustrating, the choice of landing zone and use of flares gives you a simplified rule set that builds in complexity over time. This mostly automated system made for both exciting victories and agonizing defeats that I grew to love. You'll also be able to use a support ship off the coast to shoot flares, send in first aid kits, or even lay waste to the enemy camp with guided missiles. I couldn't help but get excited every time I had enough points to fire off another missile from the ship. The mixture of pre-battle strategy, real-time attack simulation, and active support makes for a very engaging experience that not many iOS games have captured.

The fact that battles still occur while you’re not playing made signing in to find out I had been attacked both terrifying and tantalizing. There’s a unique sense of pride when watching a replay of an attack that my defenses thwarted, and defeats taught me more about how I should be laying out my beachfront base. I quickly learned and appreciated that tactical placement of base buildings is important, as opposed to other games of this style where placement is largely meaningless.

However, for a game that’s well populated with other humans, it’s stripped of any meaningful ability to connect with those players. There’s no chat functionality or depth to the interaction, and it became repetitive to only be able to either ignore or attack other player bases. Boom beach is begging for a way to taunt your foes or ally with them, but that sort of collaboration is not currently available.

When you’re not battling, you’re working to upgrade your base. The variety in all the materials needed for upgrades and their constant scarcity borders on maddening. Of the nine resources, gold is the easiest to come across and yet the most difficult to spend. Wood is the essential building block early on, but becomes the constant bane of your beachy existence. Once you finally have a steady amount of wood coming in, you'll run up against a stone wall (no pun intended), and then an iron one. There are just too many of these requirements in the way to allow for an reasonable pace of progression.

 

That path to upgrading your base would not be as frustrating if improvements affected more than just one building, but the frustration piles up as I look across my base and see every building calling out for an improvement. Being a completionist of sorts, this was like someone giving me a skin burn while fingers scratch across a chalkboard. It didn't ruin the experience entirely, but there were several times when I chose my upgrades poorly and had to wait an hour or more for the opportunity to right my wrong.