Risk iPhone Review

First off, what is Risk you may well ask. The short, short, short, short version? This is a classic board game from Parker Brothers for between two (three in the iPhone version) and six players, the aim is to take over the world. Was that too brief? A slightly longer version involves attacking and invading neighbouring territories with your armies, marching your war machine across the map with the aid of nothing more than dice and a bit of lady luck.

Simple in nature, easy to learn, this aptly named title has come in many flavours over the years, not just anniversary and special editions, but also Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, Narnia, Halo, heck even a 2210 A.D. version. EA Games have brought us the standard official basic version to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch platform, though I do wonder if they might start adding other licenses if this sells well.

Anyway, already know how to play Risk? Then you can freely skip to the next page! If not, read on...

Every game goes the same, you pick the number of players, take it in turns to place your armies one at a time on the various territories of the board. Then each player in turn has their go, which consists of three phases.

The first phase involves adding reinforcements to any territory that player already holds, the number of new armies they get depends on factors such as how many areas they hold, with bonuses for holding an entire continent of which there are six. Bigger harder to defend continents are worth more recruits than smaller isolated ones. So if you hold all of Australia, you get a bonus of two armies, but hold Asia and you are gaining seven every single turn.



Additional armies can be gained by turning in Risk cards, these you get one of every time you conquer a territory. If you happen to wipe out an enemy from the game by capturing their last area, then you'll receive all their Risk cards too. Turn in three matching cards, or three that are all different, and you'll get more armies to place. The more you turn in, the more you get, with extra bonus armies if you control territories on the cards.

Second phase is where the action happens, here you get to attack any territory adjacent to your own, providing you have more than one army in that territory, as much as you like, until either one side or another gets wiped out, or you decide to stop beating your head against a brick wall. And here in lies one of the two reasons this game is aptly named, beating your opponent is an act of attrition, one which is partly dependant on luck of the dice.

The attacker gets to roll a number of die up to the maximum of three, one for each army in the attacking territory, whilst the defender gets one for each defending army, up to the maximum of two. Then the top roll for each side is compared, if the attacker out rolls then the defender loses an army, otherwise even if it's a draw the attacker loses one of theirs. Then the next two highest dice are compared, unless of course the defender only got to roll one die.



This system is repeated until either the attacker has wiped out the defender, the attacker only has one army left, or the attacker decides to give up. Whilst the bigger the attacking army the more likely they are to ultimately win, sometimes it can incur heavy losses in the process, and others have the attacker so convinced the defender has rigged the dice, he has introduced the other players to all new levels of swear words.

When you defeat an army, you have to move at least the number of troops you attacked with to the defeated territory, whilst always maintaining at least 1 in the place you attacked from. So if you have three in the attacking place, there was one defender, and you defeated them without losing any troops, you could only attack with two armies and both of those two would have to move to the newly conquered area.

Once this phase is over, you get one last thing you can do before your go is over. You can move any number of troops from one of your territories to one other. Some versions of the game limit this to adjacent territories only, but this one doesn't.



Hopefully players new to Risk now begin to see the dilemma, how many troops do you leave behind to defend as you advance? Where should you place your troops in the first place? As your elite army works its way across Europe, how thin do you spread it? When do you stop attacking? Can you wipe out a whole continent before they are whittled down too low? Do you keep your big armies on the front line and leave the territories nobody can attack yet defenceless?

Every decision is not without risk, if you capture a continent and start bolstering up your armies whilst others push on, their recruits will outgrow yours. Do you camp one nearby territory in another continent just to stop someone from receiving a troop bonus? But getting there might prove costly in troop numbers.

And so on, and so on.

If you want to read more about the rules and history of Risk, plus the variations which obviously you can't play on the iPhone, check out the very good Wikipedia page on it all. It also has a nice table showing you the probabilities of winning vs certain army sizes.
So now onto EA Games implementation of this classic on the iPhone. At first glance what you get is okay graphics, a tutorial which will walk you through the game, three difficulty levels, up to five computer opponents, two multiplayer modes, iPod music support, and in game achievements in the form of medals.

First up we have the tutorial option, this will talk you through both the game and how to play it on your iPhone. This gives you the impression it ends quite quickly, dumping you into a proper game, but as you carry on it begins to talk you through more and more as you carry on. Experienced players will probably abandon this quite quickly and start playing the full game, as once you know the rules and how to basically control the game, you can get stuck in.



Those still learning or needing a refresher on the whole rule thing would do well to continue, as things like cards are explained in more detail. It also informs you of a few more interface features like pinch zooming, something that will be ideal for the fat fingered. What it doesn't cover is the manual setup which is a shame, as this is such a key element to the game.

Pretty soon you will want to turn off the music and vibrations, that done you'll start playing the game proper. Here you get to enjoy a well worked interface without being nagged by the guy in the bottom left of the screen. And nicely functional it all is too. There are usually two ways of doing things, either by tapping territories themselves, or tapping buttons. You can even tap and hold to save doing multiple taps. As a general rule, tapping the screen in the middle of a mini-animation sequence skips straight to the money shot. This lets you speed boring bits up nicely.

Adding troops to areas, either at the start of the game during setup, or when fortifying, is done by tapping the area you wish to add them to, and either tapping it again or using the plus and minus buttons at the bottom of the screen. When you are finished a tick option completes the process. There is no sliding in this game, it's all tapping baby.

To attack a territory, you tap the one you own, then the one you wish to attack. The bottom of the screen then shows three options, a die for instigating an attacking roll off, a nuclear button which constitutes a fight to the death (very useful for those 36 vs 1 battles), and a cancel button for giving up.



Take over a territory and you get a nice War Games style flood fill of colour, preceded by a bit of a nuclear explosion. All very functional and actually a bit retro, moving from the initial disappointment of no wow factor towards... yeah, this is more than fine for a game of Risk. This pretty much applies to all the menus and animations actually, none of it is wow, everything is pretty functional, but hay this is Risk. Sure if it was the Lord of the Rings version I'd expect something more, but it isn't.

The animated dice works very well, conveying well the yay/oh bollocks feelings that you get from playing the board game version. Additional in game facilities include a Who's Winning display where you can see who controls how many of what, there is also a reasonably useful in game help manual too. It is also nice to be able to configure options like sound without quitting back to the main menu. Seeing the play order and continent bonus screen is handy, but I couldn't see anyway to tell what cards I held.

That is quite an irritating omission, since you get bonus troops for cashing in your cards when you hold the territories on them, yet there is no way to see these cards until you cash them in. And when you are cashing them in, you can't see the world map so unless you know every single territory off by heart, where it is, whether you hold it, and whether you might want to wait a turn because your troops are quite near it, how are you supposed to know that this is the best opportunity to do so?



On the subject of gripes, the difficulty levels don't seem to scale well at all. The Easy one is ridiculously easy, the Medium level doesn't seem to be noticeably much harder. Only when you rack it up to the Hard mode do you get any sort of a challenge, but this really is a challenge, at least to a relative Risk novice such as myself. Perhaps a regular player might find even this easy, I couldn't comment, but for me I've still not come close to beating it yet after 5 or 6 goes trying.

The game supports multiplayer, but this is only possible with someone nearby on the same wireless network, or by pass and play. Netplay would be a great addition, but maybe asking too much for a game that after all only costs £2.99. What perhaps isn't asking too much is multitasking support, sure when you close the game and come back later it asks if you want to resume it, but if I just want to check my email I'd rather not have to relaunch the app and go through the menu to get there. Being able to save a game would be a nice addition too.

Alas no high resolution graphics for iPhone 4 users either, so it will also look a bit blurry for iPad users too no doubt. Not much of a bummer for the iPhone, definitely one for the iPad.

All those niggles aside, this is a very enjoyable and actually quite addictive port of the classic Risk board game. I would recommend it to fans of board games in general, or indeed someone wanting to give Risk a go but lacking the situation to do it. EA Games offering could certainly waste some serious time on the train anyway.

Pros

• Overall a pretty good interface
• Easy to skip boring bits
• Game speed is spot on, doesn't drag
• Hard difficulty is actually pretty hard
• Ability to turn music and sound off separately
• Very neat pinch zooming
• iOS 4 multitasking support

Cons

• Needs more difficulty levels
• No iPhone 4 hires graphics
• Multiplayer doesn't support netplay
• Can't check what cards you are holding

1.5.2 Update

• Support for the iOS4 "Fast-App Switching" multitasking feature
  (now making multitasking a Pro rather than a Con)
• Removal of flashing effect during attack and Total War for an improved visual experience
• Behind-the-scenes fixes and stability improvements

It's good that Risk now supports fast app switching, nice to see them add that feature. Not worthy of bumping the score from an 8 to a 9 just yet though.