Battle Islands

If you want a vision of social gaming in the future, picture an underground lab lined with tanks.

Inside each one of these behemoths of steel and glass, a Clash of Clans clone is gestating. Waiting. Dreaming of the day it will slither out of its sterile womb and sit on the App Store among its brothers and sisters.

Okay, so that metaphor is an unnecessarily grim one, but there's a pretty significant number of free-to-play titles being developed right now by studios hoping to snap up even a mouthful of Clash of Clans's success.

Battle Islands is merely one of them.

While this action / strategy game isn't a poor gaming experience by any means, there aren't any improvements to the well-established Clash of Clans template here.

The most noteworthy differences are the game's setting and the warriors you dispatch onto the battlefield.

Instead of attacking and defending medieval-inspired strongholds, you operate around bases on South Pacific islands. Instead of commanding barbarians and dragons, you are in charge of riflemen and warplanes.

History enthusiasts interested in playing a strategy / battle game set during World War II might well prefer the relative realism of Battle Islands to the fantasy world of Clash of Clans, then ("realism" is used loosely, here - actual female combatants don't typically wear cleavage-revealing uniforms).

As for everyone else, your level of enjoyment will depend on how fed up you are (or aren't) with battle strategy games.

Everybody knows the drill by now: train troops; dispatch them against enemy strongholds in campaign mode (or fellow players in versus mode); and watch them swarm the defences and structures as methodically as ants.

You then collect supplies that go back into training your own troops and beefing up your defences. Wait, wait, wait for your upgrades to be completed. Give up and spend hard currency (in this case, gold) to speed up the process. Run out of gold and make the call on whether to purchase more, grind for supplies, or just give up altogether.

If the preceding paragraph still gets you excited about battle strategy games, go on and charge headfirst into Battle Islands. Otherwise, choose pacifism.