There are two things that a tower defence game usually doesn't have.
One is a good story.
And two is characters that you actually care about.
But 2012's Defender's Quest , now available on the PS4 and XBox One, tries to break this
habit.
At first glance, it looks like your typical tower defence game.
You place your units on the map, to hold back the waves of enemies that come at you, snaking
their way along predetermined paths.
If enough of them reach your boss unit, you die and lose the mission.
Each level is like a puzzle that you have to figure out how to most effectively defend.
Different units have different abilities.
You've got ice mages that can slow the enemies down.
You've got your healers to keep your own units safe.
All of these different characters need to work together, to handle whatever creatures
are thrown at them.
At the start of each map, you take a minute to work out a plan.
You check out what type of enemies are going to come from where.
Place your knights in positions where they can hack off the armour of any reinforced
bad guys.
Place healers in locations where they can reveal the dark units, which can only really
be hit once lit up by the ether flash technique.
Each unit takes up a certain amount of Psi, and then takes even more Psi to upgrade.
How you distribute this resource is crucial towards victory.
Eventually you create what you hope is a well oiled machine, that you can sit back and watch
as your master plan comes together.
You need to keep eye on things though, upgrading and tweaking the areas that seem to be struggling.
It's a fine line between success and failure and doesn't take long for things to go from
this.
To this...
But what drives you on to keep playing, to keep saying- "OK, one more mission"?
Well part of the incentive is to level up.
All of these different pieces of your army become like a family- they all have their
part to play.
You deploy the same characters each mission, with all of them levelling up and gaining
points towards their own skill trees.
You can buy armour and weapons for them (although armour does turn out to be kind of pointless-
units typically don't die much.
And don't worry- if they do, it's not permanent.
You can just redeploy them when you have enough Psi.)
The story takes place on the boundary between life and death.
With a plague killing and transforming people into undead creatures, it's up to our hero,
Azra (or whatever you want to name her) to fight back.
But she needs help and so meets up with and hires people to join the battle.
It's strange how attached you can become to these characters.
It's like you even start making your own little stories for them.
Recruited a new guy?
Well, he's gonna need to prove himself before he's considered one of the team.
You throw him in the deep end, at a key position to see if he can cut it.
I guess you become attached, because despite the fact it's you giving the orders, it's
really all of these different heroes that are doing all the work.
You rely on them to do a job and to win.
You end up making each of them unique, using their skill tree to create things like archers
that specialise in poisoning the enemy, or dragons that nom, nom, nom, nom, eat up enemies
with under ten percent health.
There's layers of strategy that you need to use to win.
At any point, you can take control of the speed of the game.
You can pause at anytime to adjust what's going on, or slow down or speed up time when
necessary.
To help you out, Azra's also got a set of magic abilities for when things get dicey.
The timing of these moves can be crucial for success, especially later on in the campaign
when things get particularly difficult.
But if you don't win, it's not a problem.
You've got options to help you out.
You can go back to replay earlier levels, perhaps at harder difficulties to gain some
extra XP.
Even failing still earns you slight rewards.
You're never entirely wasting your time.
But there is one problem- every team member gets same amount of XP, regardless of what
they did or even if they ever entered the field or not.
It would have been nice if the characters that the do most work, levelled up the most,
encouraging you to think a bit more about exactly who should go where.
It would make you have the choice of whether you want to rely on the strongest, or give
the weakest the chance to grow.
This guy levels up as much as this girl- but clearly one's doing all the work!
But hang on a sec, why is that the slugs are the fastest units in the game!
Slugs, little slimy slugs.
All of the different types of enemy need to be handled in different ways, but unfortunately,
they lack variety visually.
Often they're just a pallet change, so the game could have done with more enemy types.
No bats?
No spiders?
What kind of video game is this!?!
But what's Defender's Quest's biggest flaw?
It's performance.
Modern consoles should easily be powerful enough handle this...
305 MB game.
But too often things slow right down, and cause glitches and even crashes, usually when
a lot of stuff is going on on the screen.
Overall the presentation is a little lacking.
The sprites are all fine, but things like the game's journal have a lot of fun stuff
in them, but their layout's not exactly that appealing.
It's all very basic, making you less inclined to read it.
Which is a shame- there is some funny stuff here, adding some more depth to the characters.
It took me 7 seven and a half hours to complete the game, but that's just start.
New game plus lets you take your characters onto harder versions of missions, plus some
new ones too.
As well as new journal entries and even a whole new currency system to buy the best
weapons with.
And plenty of secrets to uncover.
It really is worth playing long after credits role.
Initially I struggled with things, but I'm not a veteran T.D. player, but I did soon
get better.
There's always a better tactic to try, different orders to give and training to be done.
Check it out.
Next review I'm NOT going to be doing Metal Gear Survive, partly because I don't want
to enter the Metal Gear universe without Kojima at the helm.
Plus it doesn't look that good.
So next time... it's time to head to ancient Egypt to play...
Immortal Redneck.
Thanks for watching.
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