Another day, another tower defence game. We may be a little selection biased, but there's always room for more of the same on the iPhone - especially at the impossibly cheap introductory price. Besides, a game that claims to fuse trading cards with tower defence certainly deserves a look!

So how does it stack up? Truth be told, it plays very similarly to the rest of the genre - there's a variety of path based mazes which you can place elemental monsters (not towers, this time) around. Each monster has it's own attack radius and size - the larger monsters will take up much more room on the field and so limit your space for others - whereas the smaller monsters do lighter damage but can be packed closer together. Furthermore, attack radius can be affected by obstacles the terrain may have.

What makes this one different is the monsters will move from place and attack the incoming enemies, which looks like a lot of fun. There's two types of enemy too - flying and ground, and so not all of your monsters will be able to attack all of the enemy force. This is great because it forces you to think before spending your mana on monsters that may not obliterate the next wave.

Mana is collected from the enemies and also comes in bonus form if you survive the wave without letting too many creeps through. It's the energy that allows you to summon your monsters onto the field, and also lets you upgrade their abilities. Some monsters even have special abilities that affect other monsters within it's target area - like improving their speed or damage.

But what's truly unique is the card system. At the beginning you have 5 cards in your deck, and these equate to the monsters on the field. When you play a level, you collect more cards by defeating enemy monsters - effectively both you and the AI use the same monster set, but the catch is that you can only have 5 monsters in your deck at a time. Earning coins on a stage (there's no indication of how this is done, only you get them when you finish/lose a stage) allows you to purchase the cards to upgrade your deck. You have half a dozen deck slots to utilise, and 50 total cards to unlock.

You may find yourself replaying stages again to find the rarer cards - in addition you can only carry one 'legendary' card in your deck at any given time. In fact, replaying is made necessary by the fact that the game does throw a lot of challenge at you - and the only way to overcome it is to find the more powerful cards in the game. There's quite a bit of strategy to buying as well, because the game has 5 elements with their own strengths and weaknesses (for example water is strong against fire, forest is strong against water etc) - do you purchase the cheaper cards with a low mana cost to have a certain elemental in your deck, or do you save up for high mana cost ultimate cards? It's really up to you.

Amongst the cool presentational features we found a nice fast forward switch, a 'guide' button that simplifies the map to make it easier to see (you can also pinch to zoom), and an 'assistance' mode that shows the element of all the monsters on the field, including your own. What wasn't so hot was that the fast forward switch was actually a menu popup instead of a toggle button, and so could get cumbersome especially in the middle of a heated battle. Also, the game is paused after every wave to show you the upcoming monsters - we'd have preferred another method, especially as rounds can be brief on fast forward.

Otherwise this is a well presented game. The music does tend to grate after a while, being on a pretty tight loop - but the graphics and environments look very good. The artwork for the cards is superlative, and all of the monsters look spectacular. If you're looking for a challenge, ElementalMonster TD has to be on your buy list.

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