Like if Angry Birds had a trebuchet.

As an older gamer, I’ve come to expect a great deal of quality out of the games I purchase. The fact that the gaming market is flooded with ripoffs, uninspired sequels and endless piles of shovelware causes me to look upon my purchase options with a slightly more discerning eye. And it’s no different when it comes to mobile gaming.

The iPhone and iPad App Store has over 100,000 unique applications, the vast majority of which are games. Some are fairly cheap, mostly between $1 to $5. Others carry a more premium price (I’m looking at you, every Square-Enix game). So when one comes along that’s both fun and cheap [read:free], I can’t help but want to talk about it. Enter Crush the Castle.

Now, let me backpedal here. Since I downloaded Crush the Castle HD, the price has risen from FREE to $0.99 on the App Store, for both iPhone and iPad. So, if you snoozed, you losed, man. But still, $0.99. Quit yer bitchin’…

Armor Games has taken their tried and true castle crashing flash game from the interwebs and made it available on the App Store. Using their trusty trebuchet, players will fling boulders, bombs, magnets and even singularities at castles made of wood, stone, steel and glass. Each weapon at your disposal carries a certain tactical advantage over the multitude of building materials, and it’s up to you to figure out the best approach to reduce each castle to a pile of bodies and rubble.

There exist three lands to conquer in Crush the Castle, with each land subdivided into different territories. Arcturia, Skull Island and the Armor Isles. Conquering each territory will unlock a new weapon to be used upon the next, but that same weapon will also be utilized in past levels for which you may not have received a Gold Medal. Successfully receive Gold on every castle in the game and every single weapon from all different lands will be available to use as you go back and begin crushing castles all over again, but this time, to receive higher scores.

A lot of detail has been paid to make the iOS transition for Crush the Castle a smooth and favorable one. New backdrops adorn your screen, new castles have been designed to test your skills, new materials and weapons have been created to test your mettle with your catapult. The levels are challenging, the physics are oftentimes infuriatingly accurate and the feeling you get when you finally obliterate that one hard-to-crush castle is one of relief and smugness.

However, this is not to say that the game is perfect. A couple problems present themselves, some obvious, others not so much. My first complaint with the game is the sound. While the opening and menu theme are powerfully orchestrated, the rest of the sounds within the game are repetitive and uninspired. There is no real music to be heard within each level, nor is there any real commentary from the people you destroy. Just a simple scream or a yelp, some brass fanfare and onto the next structure. I expect if I dumped a vial of acid on a man’s head, he wouldn’t just yell for 2 seconds and dissolve away. Or if you saw a cluster of three bombs headed right toward your face, would you just sit there silently and await your demise? Or the singularity bomb. Do you have any idea what a singularity phenomenon would do to the mind of a person from the Middle Ages? They would literally shit themselves to death. Hell, I know I would even now. In short, get some dialogue in there. The new comedic value would make the overall package that much better.

Secondly, some of the castles to crush rely on chance and dumb luck over true aim, strategy and skill. Nothing annoyed me more in this game than carefully launching wave after wave of my weapons, carefully aimed and timed, failing and starting over just to have one fluke of a launch land in a nonexistent nook and obliterate the castle in one blow.

Third, the game was just too short. I downloaded one day and finished it the next. Now, I know I got it for free, and it’s an iOS game, but still, I’m a fan of lengthy experiences with the games I play. However, to help with that problem, Armor Games has included a castle creation mode that allows players to build their own monstrous castles. The castle editor is a simple to use, drag and drop UI that, for all I can tell, was used by the team behind the game itself. Choose from every material in the game, place your little people where you want them, and then knock it all down. How very toddlerish of you.

Crush the Castle HD is a fantastic, fun, frustrating fling through fake Medieval warfare. At $0.99, the game is a steal, and despite its short campaign, the castle editor will have you building structures and handing your iOS device off to your friend to challenge them with your creation. And before anyone goes and calls Crush the Castle an Angry Birds ripoff, I’d like to clarify and tell you that Crush the Castle was an online game available almost 9 months before Angry Birds ever hit the App Store. And as far as this gamer is concerned, it’s much more enjoyable.

Images