Turtle, Turtle, Turtle: RTSes for Basebodies
How to prevail against waves of attacking tower defense games
5/15/2009 6:39 PM | 6 Comments | Page 3 of 4
Defense Grid: The Awakening
The Twist: The twist is that there isn't a twist. This is a straight-up, super-polished example of tower defense games. It's vanilla and by-the-numbers, which isn't necessarily a criticism. Actually, I do like that, rather than the enemies simply trying to invade you, they have to get to your base, pick up an energy core, and then carry it off the map. This not only means they'll pass your defenses twice, but it adds a new dynamic as the enemies jostle over dropped cores.
The Verdict: I nearly fell asleep, but then again, I'm not the target audience for a well-made tower defense game.
PixelJunk Monsters
The Twist: It's really cute. You walk a little man around and dance to help your towers defend better.
The Verdict: Too cute by half.
Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor
The Twist: Level up as waves of Nazis attack you.
The Verdict: This is little more than a half-baked mod for
Company of Heroes. While it sounds cool, you can see all it has to offer after a single play-through.
Fieldrunners
The Twist: It's on the iPhone. It's supposedly the most popular iPhone tower defense game, which is quite an accomplishment, considering four out of five iPhone games are tower defense games.
The Verdict: I already told you I don't have an iPhone. What do you want from me?
Plants vs. Zombies
The Twist: PopCap has loaded this thing with more mini-games than anyone has any right to expect for the price. The tower defense part of the game is just getting you warmed up. So in a way, this isn't a tower defense game so much as a PopCap smorgasbord with a tower defense game as a base layer.
The Verdict: Get it even if you don't like tower defense games.
Immortal Defense
The Twist: If Philip Glass, Philip K. Dick and Stanley Kubrick were to collaborate on a tower defense game, it would look like this weird, trippy journey into "pathspace" that is guaranteed to induce 20-percent more epileptic seizures than Geometry Wars. On the way to the trippy gameplay, you'll go through a main menu with Billie Holiday playing in the background and references to Dostoyevsky on the scenario selection screen.
The Verdict: It may be pretentious, but it's a good-enough game to bear up under its pretension. Good games are allowed to be this learned. This is a damn fine tower defense game, and probably the most pleasant surprise among them all. In fact, it's pretty much the reason I'm writing this column on tower defense games. Until I stumbled across this gem, I was ready to just dink around with
Plants vs. Zombies for a while. And really, stuff like
Immortal Defense is what makes videogaming such a great hobby. You're tooling along, bored with the usual stuff, underwhelmed by the big-budget epic stuff, ready to dismiss an entire genre with a weary jaded wave, and out of the blue -- BANG! -- you find something that thrills and delights you when you least expect it.
