Nun Attack review

It’s not every day you see a quartet of nuns packing heat, but then there’s nothing like a rogue Sister turning evil to really tick a holy gal off.

Nun Attack follows four nuns on a mission to tackle a world overrun by evil. Sister Mortana, also known as the Fallen Nun, has succumbed to the dark side and now prayers are going unanswered and the devil’s minions are running free across the land. It’s the job of the holy quartet to take on 40 levels of the undead, each with a number of battles to complete, all leading to an almighty shoot-out with the Fallen Nun at the game’s conclusion.

Each nun is equipped with their own weapon, strengths and special power for unleashing when things are getting sticky. Weapons are upgradeable via gold you earn in levels, though pricing can be pretty hefty after the first upgrade. You can of course buy coins via an in-app purchase, something you may feel driven to after tackling the same level for the tenth time.

In the earlier stages you only fight with two nuns at a time, so you have to pick your team carefully. You move nuns by dragging a line to where you want them to go, and engage in battle with an enemy in the same way. Drag a line towards them and a circle around the nun will go red so you know battle has begun. Once engaged, shooting is automatic, and both enemy and nun have a life bar hovering above their head so you know how much life they’ve got left in them.

If your team is getting overpowered, unleashing one of the special powers can help. These range from boosting all the nuns’ health to creating a fighting hologram for an extra pair of hands. Once you’ve used one, it will take some time to build up before you can use it again.

Another helping hand comes in the form of miracles. You’ll need to dig up golden chests to unlock them, but once you have you can buy miracles and unleash them, even mid-game. New guns are unlocked in the same way, but can only be used by the nun they were intended for.

So what’s it like to play? We found gameplay was occasionally frustrating – dragging your nun to the path of an enemy sometimes just saw them walking that way rather than kicking them into fighting action, leaving you vulnerable. Plus the expensive weapon upgrades can be restrictive too, leaving you tackling levels over and over. If you die, you’re stuck playing through the whole level again, re-fighting battles you may have previously completed to get back to where you were.

Still, with a bit of patience – and perhaps the odd in-app purchase – Nun Attack is a whole lot of fun. It may take a bit of time to get used to the mechanics of controlling a number of characters at once, but once you’re used to it, it’ll work miracles on all that spare time you’ve got on your hands.