War Room first impressions

After getting my greedy little hands on War Room here are my first impressions:

War Room is a 150MB download from your iTunes Store so it takes a while to download depending on your connection speed.

Once you start it, you need to be quite patient as it is loading up. It will also automatically pull the latest updates from the server.

Once it finished loading, you can create your own account.

Once you created your own account, you can start using the app. However, at this point there isn't really any use to it as you are missing the faction decks.

Now you can purchase either single faction decks, all faction decks for a game (Warmachine or Hordes) or a bundle with all decks for both games. The more you buy at once, the cheaper the price for a single faction deck.

The paying process is very painless because the iTunes Store already has your credit card information. You hardly notice you are spending money. Yes, I bought the big bundle.

Once the payment process is completed, you already have access to the faction decks in your purchase. In other words, you already have all the necessary data after the initial download, paying for the decks just unlocks them.

After setting up everything on my iPhone, I started the app on my iPad. All it takes is to log in with your new account, after that everything is updated automatically via the server. However (accuse me of bitching, but I don't like this), the app notifies me that a second device has been successfully registered with a maximum total of two devices allowed!!!

After the initial start on my iPad, the app didn't recognize I had already purchased all faction decks and kept asking me if I want to buy them. I turned off the app, restarted it, logged in again, and then found the "Restore Purchases" button at the very bottom of the Store. Once I hit that, everything worked on the iPad, too.

War Room works on the iPhone only in the vertical position, on the iPad only in the horizontal position. I guess that was the only way to do it in order to use the screen space efficiently.

If you have an iPhone and an iPad, you want to look at it on your iPad. iPhone is good enough on the go and doesn't feel too tiny, but it's on the iPad where the app shines.

Whenever you open a new faction deck, it takes a while to load. I wish there were a way to make these loading times shorter.

Browsing the cards and creating an army list is a breeze. However, compared to iBodger I really miss the collection feature and its filter. PP, put that on your feature list.

Also unlike in iBodger, you cannot manually enter the army size - the app only lets you pick the standard army sizes in the rule book.  PP, put that on your feature list.

All in all, I give this app 8 out of 10 points.