Candy Wars App For iPhone

Candy Wars is an App Store-friendly rework of the old classic DopeWars (aka DrugWars) which has been around in various forms on various platforms since 1984. It is, and always has been, a text-based game where your goal is to make as much cash as possible by peddling your wares and taking advantage of crazy price fluctuations that result from random market conditions that crop up.

Catamount Software clearly wasn’t gonna get this past the iTunes censors if it had drug dealers running around New York City while they peddle heroin and buy guns to shoot Officer Hardass in the face, so everything has been very cleverly translated into a world where the FDA has banned sweets because Americans are just too damn fat. Yeah I know, it’s art imitating life. In this new reality, if people want a sugar fix they’ll have to get it from you, the seedy drug—I mean candy–dealer who can hook ‘em up with everything from chocolate to jelly beans to sugar sticks. You’re no longer packing heat but you can buy Pixie Dust and if you manage to “charm” (ie: kill) enough FDA agents they’ll leave you be, but if you get busted then chances are they’ll confiscate your stash and half your bankroll which is a major buzzkill.

Being that this is a text game you’ll find yourself constantly flipping back and forth between drug, I mean, candy prices and various stops on the New York subway system. Switching subway stations takes a day off your calendar, so you really need to maximize your profits wherever you can to build that bank and get on the global scoreboard. Once your 30 (or 60 or 90) days are up, it’s game over!

Candy Wars just recently underwent an upgrade and still has a couple of small bugs here and there, but it’s nothing that really disrupts gameplay. The graphic menus are also kind of *blah* and the scoreboards are a little hard to read, but if you’ve played DopeWars or DrugWars in the past and loved it, you can still expect to have a ton of fun with this app. If you’ve never played this old classic and are assuming that text-based games just suck the big one by virtue of being all text, take a moment to consider how many sucky games are floating around the iTunes App Store right now… and then consider that there just might be a reason that this particular game has survived for 25 years!

Get Candy Wars through iTunes

Contributed by iPhone app connoisseur Michael McCauley. Read more of Michael’s reviews at iphoneappreviews.net