Cell Expansion Wars is the spiritual successor to Auralux
A few weeks ago I was hankering to play Auralux again… for those who haven’t played it, it’s remarkably entertaining – build up dots around a dot, go take over other dots, chill music plays, and whatever. For whatever reason I couldn’t remember the name and ended up with Cell Expansion Wars in my quest to find it.
The object is simple – be the only color cell left on the board while fighting against 1-3 other colors of cells attempting to be the same. A number on your cell indicates how strong it is, stretching to reach another cell lowers that number and then slowly heartbeat attacks whatever you’re connected to. Cells can share health in the same way they overwhelm enemy cells and overall it’s some good fun.
Enough fun that I’m on stage 388 and supposedly have played for 25 hours at this point and I have a 7yo coaching me as to what needs to happen for me to win.
The game does offer in-app purchases. These allow you to cheat yourself out of learning how to beat a level. You can also collect so many coins a day and buy them. The purchases allow you to heal a cell, flip a cell to your color, and I don’t know what the last one is because I vowed no pay to play. I’ve used one of these boosters in a training round as requested and one somewhere around level 255 when I couldn’t get my head around how I was supposed to win and I had many free coins.
Along the way you jockey for acquisition of healing cells (they heal much more than regular,) attack cells (moar damage!) and multi-attack cells that can send up to four lines out.
It’s got ads between levels, and your first 50 or so levels you’re going to notice that as the first few are easy, but later in the game you’re not going to be passing stages particularly quickly. These are the 5 second ads that are skippable, I’ve yet to see one longer than that.
Supposedly around level 500 some people feel the power ups are required, if so that’ll be where I walk away with 25+ hours of fun and probably having given them a few bucks of advertising revenue.
Anyway, if you’ve enjoyed Auralux or its sequel and are looking for something similarly fun, check out Cell Expansion Wars… it’s fun and more people need to make games like this.
