Review:
Hellemental, or Hella Mental? (Hellemental iPhone App Review)

What’s funny is that I did not make the title of this article up. Nope. No sir-ee. Intersog, the developers behind Hellemental, thought of the lovely “Hella mental” pun themselves. But anyway, back on track. Hellemental is your typical run-of-the-mill Tower Defense game, with some interesting twists thrown in.

To start, you are a magical wizard named Elijah, who’s been tasked with protecting the many cities in the world of Norlisk. At your disposal are the powers of nature: earth, fire, wind, water, heart…GO PLANET!

Seriously though, you can cross out the heart element, but everything else is there. Although the game tries hard at containing a narrative RPG-esque story, I have found that Intersog should stay more focused on game-making rather than trying their hand at narrative writing. If you take a look at their introduction to the game, it’s riddled with grammatical errors, incorrect spellings, and names that are spelled (and probably pronounced) differently each time they are used. But hey, we’re not in English class, so I can, begrudgingly, put that aside…for now.

Gameplay-wise, Hellemental is a pretty typical Tower Defense game. Hordes of monsters will come at your Tower’s (in this case city’s) gate, and try to smash it down and gorge themselves on the fleshy denizens inside. As a powerful wizard, you stand proudly atop the city’s barricaded gates and inflict nature’s wrath upon these monstrous foes.

At first, you’ll only have measly rocks to throw at your opponents. They don’t do much damage, but as soon as you complete the first level, you’ll gain gold to which you can use to unlock powerful (but limited in usage) spells. Just like in most RPGs, spells of a particular element have monsters that they work incredibly well on, some monsters that the spells’ damage is halved when used, and even some monsters that are unaffected by a certain type of spell. You can upgrade the spells as well, unleashing even more powerful versions of their former selves (Can we say Final Fantasy, anyone?).