Hold the Line!

I'm not a huge tower defense player. I don't really know the reasons for this since I'm pretty much a compulsive turtler in RTSes (and thus really bad at multiplayer) but I think it might have something to do with the fact that I'll start playing a tower defense game and then suddenly three hours has passed.

This happened to me in this game.

The game itself is fairly simple. At first I thought it was too simple and pretty damn hard but it turned out that I could modify my turrets by right clicking and a whole new world opened up to me. This game definitely could benefit from a small manual of some sort.

In what I believe to be regular tower-defensy manner things walk up to you and it's your business to make sure things don't. There are three different map layouts that provide a bit of a strategical difference but to anyone familiar to the genre (ie. not me) it should be fairly straightforward.

The GUI seems simple enough although "Rate" was confusing at first because at a first glance a higher "rate" should logically mean faster firing but it's the other way around. And once you get that there is a right-click thing (like it says on the gamepage but nowhere once you have the game downloaded) it too is very straightforward. There's also special abilities you can use that cost mana (which recharge slowly), however I hardly ever used them despite their obvious usefulness. Maybe if they had been on the same GUI page as the turrets or something. Another minor niggle is the fact that you have to scroll the turret list even though there's only one extra turret.

I guess these are minor usability nitpicks though overall the game works pretty well and I was strangely addicted to finishing those 25 waves. I found it to be fairly difficult, probably because I didn't use the special abilities at all and my general tower defense noobishness. I guess I could say the game is fairly well balanced like that because it never becomes a cakewalk where you survive on your static defense alone but you always have to adapt and change the gameplan.

Or maybe there is an easy way to win and I just didn't find the optimal build.

Oh yeah two other minor nitpicks I also found. It would have been nice to turn down or off the music because after an hour or so the music track got a bit tiresome. Would have been nice with an options menu. Secondly there was a bug that when you started on a level sometimes the interface wouldn't load and I had to press escape to bring up the pause menu and then unpause and it would show up again.

But yeah this is a nice casual time-killer with plenty of replayability. It's really nothing special but everything works about as well as you'd expect it to work.