Defense Technica Review

Every week we see a new tower defense game take its run at consumers wallets. Some fare better than other and it’s usually down to innovation and unique ideas, which sadly this title lacks. 

The campaign is a basic set of your run-of-the-mill tower defense boards. There is a central point in this game referred to as ‘The Core’, which you must defend from the ever-evolving line of spawning minions attempting to destroy It. To combat these minions you must build(you guessed it) towers! The towers can be upgraded and have mini tech trees which determine in which way you would like to take a specific tower. This at least gives some variety to an otherwise iterative title.

So you plonk down towers all over the map in pre-determined locations to combat the oncoming hordes. To afford towers you must kill the little minions coming at you who drop a resource, differing in amounts depending on the difficulty of the enemy in question, and wave your cursor over the dropped resources to collect them. Here is where my first issue with the game comes up: the screen can feel very cluttered at times. There are indicators for incoming enemies as usual, but the way the game makes you jump back and forth to pick up the resources, instead of just giving them to you, is frankly tedious and several times just made me dizzy. This is compounded by the fact that using a controller seemed to be the method the devs are pushing towards. With a keyboard and mouse this game feels a lot more sluggish than with a controller, which is quite a feat considering that historically a mouse and keyboard give you better precision and accuracy. I know any self-respecting PC gamer should own a 360 pad, but this is no excuse to just ignore the main input of a platform altogether.

Now, not being a member of the newer school of tower defense that has popped up recently, where you are actually a player within the world, this confuses me further. Why is the player forced to pick up resources when they’re not really part of the universe they’re partaking in? This is a small issue, but suitably manages to disconnect the player from feeling anything other than the compulsion to finish the level, yet there doesn't seem to be a huge emphasis on score either, so I’m not sure this was intended.

Outside of the missions you can level up your differing types of towers, and that’s about it. There are leaderboards and achievements, but that’s literally it. There is not anything to keep you coming back unless you’re into completing everything. There are two modes, Normal and Hardcore. Normal appeared to be difficult enough to myself and I’m not a seasoned tower defense veteran, so Hardcore may cater more to the regular crowd who eat up the constant releases of these types of games. But on the topic of difficulty, my second gripe with this game comes in. There are constant difficulty spikes for no apparent reason. Some levels would just feel impossible while finishing the previous/succeeding one on your initial try.

Visually the game is very middle of the road. The visuals are reminiscent of Starcraft thrown into a dark brown puddle. The enemies are generic robotic looking aliens, and yes they really are as bland as that. There are the small weak ones, the slightly larger weak ones, bigger not so weak ones, large enemies with armour and shields, flying ones and finally bosses. There is such a small variety, it was very disappointing. 

I think that kind of sums this game up: disappointing. It’s not something that really ever catches your attention for longer than a single level. I found myself, several times, closing the game down after playing a level and coming back later because it just felt tedious.
After I had played for a while I did some research and found this was also released quite recently on mobile devices and that made more sense to me. This game suits short bursts and not extended play sessions.

In the end it’s extremely competent and does the genre reasonably well. There are problems with pacing, but if you’re hungry for your next fix of tower defense and can’t wait until Defense Grid 2, have already played both Sanctum games AND haven’t tried the “Premium BBQ Defense Simulator” Go Home Dinosaurs, then pick this up. Otherwise this is a neither a must purchase, nor an ignore at all costs. Merely just pick up if you have nothing better to do.