Name: WarHeads
Item: WarHeads
Author: Retro Replay

WarHeads

WarHeads hooks you with the familiar, delicious tension of turn-based artillery: line up a shot, account for the terrain, then hold your breath while a missile crosses the map. The space setting gives that formula a sharper twist, because every planet has its own mass and gravity. A shot that looked straightforward can bend, stall, or swing wildly as it passes through a solar system.

Its biggest strength is how much room it gives you to experiment. Around 50 ship weapons, destructible environments, custom weapon editing, and matches for up to ten combatants make it a deep toy box for patient tacticians. If you enjoy learning trajectories through costly mistakes and laughing when a clever plan goes spectacularly wrong, WarHeads is well worth digging into.

Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

WarHeads starts with a pleasingly simple promise: destroy the other ships before they destroy yours. Then the planets get involved. Each new level is a different solar system, and the mass and gravity of its randomly placed planets affect every missile. That single rule turns ordinary artillery aiming into a lively exercise in judgment. You are not merely choosing an angle and hoping; you are trying to picture a path through competing gravitational pulls.

The first few turns will likely be messy, especially if you come in expecting a standard Scorched Earth-style arc. Missiles do not owe you a neat, predictable flight line here. That can be frustrating when an apparently sensible shot drifts away from its target, but it is also where the game earns its character. Once you begin treating the planets as part of the weapon puzzle rather than as background obstacles, successful shots feel properly earned.

Destructible environments keep a fight from settling into a static firing range, while the roughly 50 weapons give you plenty to test once basic aiming starts to click. The weapon editor is an unusually generous addition for a game built around experimentation: you can customize the arsenal and share those creations by e-mail. Single-player is useful for learning the physics, but head-to-head, local network, and internet matches are where the endless “one more round” potential really lives. Support for up to ten simultaneous players can turn a careful duel into gleeful orbital chaos.

Graphics

WarHeads frames its battles around spaceships and randomly arranged planets in individual solar systems. The important visual read is the battlefield layout: you need to see where ships sit in relation to the planetary bodies that will pull each missile off course.

Story

The setup is lean: rival players enter an unexplored quadrant of space and try to wipe one another out.

That is enough for this kind of game, because the real drama comes from survival. Staying alive earns points and money, making each successful turn part of a longer competitive push rather than just a disconnected explosion.

Do not come to WarHeads for elaborate sci-fi lore. Its space setting works as a clean frame for the rivalries that emerge at the table or across a network: the player who has found the gravity trick, the opponent who keeps escaping, and the final shot that either ends the match or sends you back to the drawing board.

Overall Experience

WarHeads is an artillery game for people who want the usual turn-based firing contest to fight back. Planetary gravity makes its systems less immediately friendly than a simple angle-and-power duel, but far more interesting once you accept that misses are part of the lesson. The physics can make early games feel cruel; the payoff is that the battlefield keeps demanding fresh thought.

The breadth of play options matters. You can practice alone, stage direct head-to-head fights, or pull in a larger group locally or online, and the custom-weapon editor gives regular groups a reason to keep changing the rules around themselves. Ten-player support sounds especially suited to loud, unpredictable matches where survival matters as much as accuracy.

Give it a chance if you like artillery games with room for discovery and can enjoy a failed shot as useful information. Skip it only if you need immediate, tightly predictable ballistics. For everyone else, WarHeads offers the satisfying kind of tactical disorder where learning a system is inseparable from blowing up your friends.