AbleGamers' iPhone Game of the Week:Fragger Desert Strike

The Holy Hand Grenade is not something to be taken lightly; it is a powerful weapon in any game, especially in Fragger Desert Strike, a Miniclip game available on the app store. You control the grenadier who is charged with eliminating the enemies on the map by tossing his limited number of grenades and detonating them. A large black outlined arrow appears to show the angle of your grenade toss, while the arrow fills up depending on the power. The mechanics are simple and intuitive. Dragging a finger up or down angles the shot, while dragging it left or right determines the power. Mastering the power and angle combinations seems daunting at first, but after a few tosses the physics become apparent. Fragger requires fine motor skills to make slight adjustments to the angle or velocity.
           

Fragger allows you to take your time. While many games determine the score based on how fast you complete the level, Fragger leaves time out of the mix by determining your score based on the number of grenades you use which encourages slowly analyzing and thinking. The game also awards bonus points for things like hitting enemies with a grenade, and getting double kills. To get maximum points however, the game requires you to detonate the grenades manually. Detonating frags midair over two enemies can net you a double or triple kill bonus, which can sometimes be hard to attain by merely letting the grenades explode on their own. This however is only necessary for those craving to be featured on the high score leaderboards.
           

The game has a linear progression through forty levels of grenade tossing goodness. The difficulty gradually increases as Fragger slowly introduces new concepts. Starting from a basic pit with an enemy, the game progresses to buildings filled with tangos to underground bunkers with combustible, explode-able, boxes. As the difficulty increases, you get more grenades and chances to eliminate the enemies. If by any chance you run out of grenades, the level simply restarts with no penalty. And after a failed attempt Fragger asks you if you would like to view the solution, which queues a short video demonstrating one possible solution. Some of the levels have multiple solutions, although the latter levels lose the freedom in favor of problem solving creating more of a puzzle game than a sandbox grenade toss. Fragger also employs a useful skip function in case a level is too difficult; any level can be skipped, thereby unlocking the next level.
           

The cartoony visuals are never too hard to see. The enemies are always the same figure wearing blue jeans and a grey shirt and mask, however the large white eyes always make them stand, even when they are on a dark background. The different exploding boxes have arrows showing in which way they explode. Dark boxes have blue arrows indicating that they will travel in a certain direction before exploding, while red crates explode on the spot and brown ones are impervious to the holy grenade.
           

No matter what you call the holy hand grenade, there’s no disagreeing that Fragger is an incredibly fun, accessible, and free, iPhone game.