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This week's "App of the Week" is a game for the Mac: Land Air Sea Warfare. This real-time strategy game pits two to four similar armies of different colors against each other on different types of battles fields. While there are many types of victory options, the main one is to just wipe the opposing enemy off the map by building the biggest army. LASW does have some team options (player + computer vs computer + computer), but no multiplier (player vs player) options at this time.

Each army has a multitude of different types of units to attack the enemy like submarines, tanks, helicopters, destroyers, bombers, fighter planes, and hovercrafts. There are also plenty of defensive units like walls, anti-aircraft jeeps, surface to air missile launchers, 155mm caliber canons, anti-air SAM launchers, long range artillery, torpedo launchers, and heavy defense installations.

Many of the weapons or vehicles will need to be researched before they can be built. Research is done at headquarters with improvement research being done at separate installations for land, air or sea. There are also separate factories to build land, air and sea units as well. While each army can only have one headquarters and research installations, many factories can be built.

Like most real-time strategy games, armies need resources in order to build units or installations. In LASW, the resources are ore and electricity. Electricity is produced from a number of different factories like tidal turbines, wind turbines, fusion plants, and geothermal pumps. Ore must be mined from ore deposits and kept in storage containers.

Each game can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to play, depending on the size of the field and armies involved. LASW is not nearly as in depth or complicated as Star Craft or Age of Empires. It also does not have a campaign mode. Yet, there still is plenty of depth for those who don't have the time to get into the bigger, more expensive real-time strategy games. LASW is $9.99 on the iPad and $19.95 on the Mac, which is a great price for an excellent strategy game. While LASW is in the iPad App Store, it is not in the Mac App Store, which is unfortunate.

I started playing LASW on the iPad. It was a lot of fun to play on the iPad and when I got my Macbook Air, I decided to try it out on the Mac as well. While the touch interface is nice, I feel that the Mac is still better due to the use of the keyboard for shortcuts and the larger screen size. The graphics are also better on the Mac than the iPad. There is a also very nice demo available (players can play a full game) so one can try before buying.

To view previous Apps of the Week, click here.

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