Frozen Synapse is a game which demands time, concentration and effort, but ultimately rewards those who stick with it.

Developer Mode 7 has brought its 2011 PC and Mac title, which won much praise from critics and players alike, to the iPad for tablet gamers to get their teeth into.

By all accounts, it’s a very faithful port of the original, which allows players to now engage in battle with each other across different platforms.

Your Local Guardian: Frozen Synapse

The oddly named Frozen Synapse is a turn-based tactical game which hands you a small squad of soldiers and pitches you into a fire-fight against another team of combatants controlled by the AI or a second player.

There is a twist on the traditional turn-based format which makes FS a very interesting and immersive experience.

Usually the first player moves units around, assigns them actions and watches the results. The second player counters with their own turn separately, and then the game moves back and forth turn by turn.

In FS things are done differently, with a real-time element thrown in.

Set inside an eerie blue neon-lit world, with an excellent electronica soundtrack for company, each turn starts with a planning stage. During this you can take as long as you want to decide exactly what you want your soldiers to do in the next five seconds of game time when the action unfreezes.

You can set waypoints for each unit and issue a series of orders for them to follow, including duck, run, wait and engage. You can play around with each soldier’s movements to your heart’s content, getting as precise as you want with toggling aiming lines and setting timings.

Your Local Guardian: Frozen Synapse

You can watch a dummy run of your actions and also simulate how you think (or hope) your opponent will play to get a best-case-scenario idea of how successful your planning might be.

Once you’ve refined and settled on everything, you commit your turn and either move straight on to the next stage if you’re playing the AI or wait for your opponent to lock in their turn if you’re up against another human.

The next stage is to watch both sides’ turns play out simultaneously. Here you get to see whether you outwitted your opponent with your machine gun units and if your rocket attack hit the target you had aimed at. Assuming units survive on both sides, the game moves on to the next round and restarts at the planning stage.

Although each burst of real-time action only lasts five seconds, a lot can happen in that time and there are usually casualties among one or both sides. It just takes one successful hit for each kill and I’ve found battles tend to be wrapped up in no more than five or six turns.

Your Local Guardian: Frozen Synapse

The standard brief for each clash is to exterminate the opposition squad, although there are some deviations once you get into the single-player campaign or the suite of online multiplayer modes which might have you extracting hostages or defending specific areas.

FS provides tactical turn-based play on a knife-edge. You can spend ages honing your squad’s movement in the planning stage and then watch your plans succeed or crumble in the next five seconds of unpaused play. It can change from being nail-bitingly exciting to infuriatingly frustrating to delightfully satisfying very quickly.

For newcomers like me, FS is not a very friendly game. There is nothing warm or welcoming about it when it first loads up. It’s difficult to make sense of all the options and settings from the main menu, and things don’t get any easier when trying to learn the mechanics of the game.

The only guidance on how to play is provided through a series of short videos which provide a few little snippets of gameplay with some overly brief text instructions.

The best way to work out how the game is played is to enter some instant skirmishes against the AI, but don’t expect things to suddenly click straight away here.

Your Local Guardian: Frozen Synapse

The touchscreen controls are simple enough and the interface, while a little busy, is intuitive enough for the most part. But it takes a lot of time working out what each unit can do and what all the different orders mean.

With mistakes heavily punished and the only AI setting seeming to be ‘tough’, FS is an unforgiving game which is hard to get the hang of.

You need to be something of a masochist to stick with it but the reward for perseverance is that victories taste deliciously sweet when you achieve them.

Also as you start to master the game’s steep learning curve, its true potential is revealed.

Unlike other turn-based games, there is no resource management and no bases to worry about. It’s all about the strategy, but don’t let the lack of frills fool you into this is a shallow game – FS offers a lot of depth.

Your Local Guardian: Frozen Synapse

There are definite elements of poker and chess embedded into the gameplay.

Poker because you have to make the most of the ‘hand’ of units you’re dealt at the start of each battle and then try to subtly outfox your opponent.

And chess because you have to carefully move your pieces around, finding the right strategy for the situation and trying to always think one or two moves ahead.

There are five unit types to control, offering a wealth of tactical possibilities. Depending what you’re got, you must decide whether to sit back and wait patiently for your opponent to make the first attack, be stealthy trying to trap your opponent or go for all-out assault.

In addition to the large amount of in-play options, FS also offers a lot of content.

The single-player campaign, set within a ‘dystopian cyberpunk’ struggle against an evil government, includes 55 missions of varying type and difficulty.

Those instant skirmishes I mentioned take place in arenas with different layouts and terrain each time with an array of customisation options, so should keep you busy for many hours with their stern AI challenge.

There is also a myriad of multiplayer modes so you can take your strategic skills online and compete against other people, either friends or strangers, either live or asynchronous.

Its distinctive art style, its cross-platform match-ups, its unique spin on the usual strategy format, its hidden depth and more – there is a long list of things which makes Frozen Synapse an easy recommendation. It’s an intelligent and absorbing game which fans of strategy titles would do well to check out.

Verdict: 8 out of 10