A while back, Babel Rising was pulled from Windows Phone 8 due to the tiny problem of crashing on start up. It briefly returned to Windows Phone 8 despite still being incompatible. Well, today seems like déjà vu because another partially delisted game is back in semi-working order: the Nokia exclusive tower iBomber Defense from Chillingo and Cobra Mobile.
Not ready for prime time
Unlike the dreadful Babel Rising, iBomber Defense has always been playable on Windows Phone 8 – it doesn’t crash on start up. However, the game suffered from several severe technical issues. For one, its frame rate slowed to tortoise-like speeds whenever there were too many objects on-screen at once. Annoying, but not the end of the world.
More severely, iBomber Defense would crash whenever exiting to the main menu from within a mission or after a mission. Talk about a killer menu! Some users even experienced crashing whenever a level was completed, making several Achievements impossible to unlock. Presumably, the game was partially delisted for exactly that reason.
With the recent version 1.1 update and iBomber Defense’s return, we hoped the crashing would come to an end. Sadly, our frequent tipster TNTJudbud reports that the game still crashes in the same places. It looks like the patch was either ineffective or release prematurely. At this point, the game will either disappear from Windows Phone 8 again or sit around in its buggy state…. It’s hard to tell with Xbox Windows Phone.
We’ve reached out to developer Cobra Mobile and will update if we learn more about the crashing issue.
Update denied
I can’t test the update myself as I’m suffering from the c101a7d1 error code once more. As I lamented in our Picnic Wars update post, this Windows Phone Store error prevents the update from installing correctly. In this case, the update doesn’t seem to do much anyway, but it’s still extremely inconvenient, I can tell you.
World War Tower
iBomber Defense is a World War II-themed tower defense game that offers two campaigns: one for both sides of the conflict. Each side shares most of the same units but has a unique unit as well.
It plays a lot like the first geoDefense, with enemies approaching from one or two points and following set paths towards the player’s base. By building and upgrading towers as soon as you can afford them, you’ll hopefully keep the foes at bay and protect your base’s precious hearts. You’ll also need to protect against aerial enemies, which can only be thwarted by AA guns.
Achievement completionists will probably want to steer clear of iBomber, even if the crashing gets fixed. Most of the Achievements are tied to beating Quick Play mode on the highest difficulty, an extremely arduous task. If you can overlook that requirement and just enjoy the Campaign, your time with the game will be much more pleasant. Check out our full review for details.
iBomber Defense costs $2.99 and has a free trial. You can view its Store page here, but the game can only be purchased from Nokia Lumia phones.
Reader comments
iBomber Defense returns to Windows Phone 8 but still crashes lots
I can suffer through the slowdown... I don't experience crashes since the original update.
What's killing me is not able to beat level 10 of the campaign. With the slowdown + 50 waves of enemies, it takes like a half hour to play that level only to lose on wave 49, everytime. Its maddening.
Once you finish the final axis level on Veteran, it unlocks 1 achievement of the final 3 & crashes to the games hub once this has initally happened, every game played after this initial crash causes every game from then on to crash to the game hub once the game is complete when it should show the stats screen. Great game to bad the issues where not addressed.
Laggy on 920
Great game, but it needs the lag issues fixed.
Darn thought I would finally be able to play this game now. Looks like I wont get any return on my $3 investment just yet. I refuse to play the game in the current state. Another 80MB of space taken from my phone for this last update that did squat.
What if I've already paid for it last time?! It's asking me to pay for it again! This is unacceptable
I'm having the same problem with a few purchased games... Try contacting MS support.