War Memory: A Battle To Remember is somewhat forgettable
War Memory: A Battle To Remember ranks among the most literal titles for any game in history. This game, which is free to users of iOS 6.0 (or later) on the iPad, iPod touch, and iPhone, takes the classic exercise of flipping over panels that display various shapes on the hidden side, in order to test your memory, and literally takes it into an actual war zone, thus the very self-explanatory name.
The game takes place on the sandy ground in the middle of a battle. A grid of 24 hexagons lie on the ground, each of which displaying war items, such as gas masks, rocket launchers, tanks, and so on. Each turn is two flipped tiles, whether you find a match or not. If you do happen to find a match, the battle intensifies, as tiny animations of fighter planes, soldiers, or whatever you happened to match are lowered onto their respective tiles.
The best, and most effective, part of this game is the intensification of the battle elements. As you collect matches, bullets fly by and loud explosions become more frequent. Especially with headphones or earbuds, this element is the part of this game that makes it uniquely challenging and interesting. The violent noises and distractions make remembering where each tile is hidden very challenging. This effect is lost, unfortunately, when the game is silenced or played with only the device's internal speaker.
Another effective part of this game is that each game is best 2 out of 3, with the board shifting left or right. It is as if the person who won the last board were advancing, like an army, towards the loser. Unfortunately, this is the last of the interesting characteristics in the game.
War Memory: A Battle To Remember is a fine and familiar experience, and the war elements elements are somewhat fun, but the whole thing feels disjunct, with no real link between memory and war, except that it is a head to head competition, but even that feels like a reach. The most clever thing about the game is probably the name. If you're looking for a free memory game, there's no reason not to choose this one. Beyond that, this game is kind of a head scratch.
