Currently in beta, Fire With Fire mixes up the tower defense formula by adding in offense. Whether in online multiplayer matches or in the not-yet-available single player campaign, players must defend their own base with towers while also destroying their opponent’s. The former is achieved through customizable defenses and the latter via sending creeps at your enemies.

The ability to attack is limited by a one-minute cooldown timer which gives players a brief respite to focus on their own defenses. Placing towers can redirect the path that incoming creeps take, with the goal being to lengthen that path as much as possible. Individual towers can be upgraded using points earned through continuing to build more towers, and stronger tower types can eventually be unlocked in each group. There’s a fairly standard tradeoff when it comes to the tower specializations like offense firepower, range, and single-target vs. splash damage. However, there are some other interesting side effects thrown in like the ability to make the enemies pop up in the air.

The offensive system is just as entertaining as protecting your own base. Players choose the types of creeps they want to send from a handful of varieties and also the order in which they’ll come in. This adds an extra layer of strategy in that some creeps are damage soakers, some are weak but speedy, and others are offensive beasts. Running them in a particular order can be much more effective once you get a feel for the enemy’s defenses. Repeatedly sending creeps of a specific variety will also evolve them into a more ferocious version. Once combat actually starts, the game moves into a passive mode where the player is either watching their own base get attacked or seeing the outcome of their own offensive onslaught. The break is brief, though, and players will need to be ready to quickly resume focus on attacking and defending.

An area where the game shines – quite literally – is in the graphical style. The environments, towers, and creeps are all drawn in a cartoonish manner (think Castle Crashers with extra texturing), and there’s a definite ‘wow factor’ in the particle effects seen on the battlefield. Flaming explosions, singeing electricity, and other effects look downright beautiful. It’s really impressive, and it will be interesting to see whether all of that activity bogs down future mobile versions of the game.

Perhaps one of the best features of Fire With Fire is that it offers multiplatform and cross-platform play. You’ll be able to take on your PC-loving friends from the comfort of your couch or recliner. While PC and Mac will be the early recipients of this title, plans also include releases on OUYA, Android, and iOS. Although the current version is focused on multiplayer – and thankfully so – a single player campaign is also in development that will include leveling up by completing specific goals.

Fire With Fire is currently in closed beta, but appears to be progressing quite well. Skull Skill Studios has placed the game on Steam Greenlight, and their Kickstarter campaign is just about to end. Kickstarter backers will receive access to the closed beta, so check it out asap.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Toast Time is a physics-based tower defense game for iOS and Android in which you play as a “Toast-ejecting recoil & reload system” or TERRY as he is more affectionately known. It’s your job to save Monday morning from an invasion of inter-dimensional blobs hell-bent on ruining breakfast, using the breaded arsenal you might expect a toaster to have at his disposal.

Controlling Terry is done by shooting your toasted ammunition, and by the magic of Newton’s third law of motion you will in-turn be catapulted in the opposite direction. This maneuverability will come in handy as the goal of each level is to stop an encroaching wave of blob monsters from reaching a clock placed somewhere within each level. Firing off slices of toast at the monsters will take them out, and the aim is to last long enough for the timer on the clock to run down to zero. At its very core, Toast Time is best described as bringing popular physics based precision puzzles to a tower defense setting.

As you progress through the levels, things become a little bit harder with the introduction of jump pads that boost the blobs over great distances or walls that obscure your aim, forcing you to be constantly aware of your positioning so you can still get a good shot off on the marching blobs. When you reach later levels, different enemy types are also introduced to shake things up a bit, ranging from a tougher ‘fat’ blob that takes multiple shots to finish off, to parachuting blobs that attack from the skies.

As you play through the levels, pickups will be introduced via crate drops which have to be shot down to be collected. These crates offer interesting – but limited – ammunition to help turn the tide of battle, with some granting explosive shatter shots or rapid fire toast slices when you need a little extra firepower. If you do especially well and score a x20 multiplier against the blobs there’s a chance for you to slip into ‘COFFEE TIME’, a berserk state that causes the screen to become stylized and ammunition to bounce off of walls for a limited time. My only gripe is that this isn’t as obvious as perhaps it should be as I had completed the game long before I knew what this bonus effect was actually doing.

With 46 levels to play through, there’s plenty to keep you occupied for a few days of casual playing (or perhaps half a day if you’re in to blitzing through content). Once you’re done with the main levels there’s a secondary mode called ‘Survival’ which has you trying to complete as many levels as possible with only one life. Much like the main portion of the game, Survival has you fighting waves until the clock runs down, but things become a lot tenser when you know that one mistake is going to cause you to lose everything.

Toast Time is a charming entry to the mobile market, slathered in the quintessential ‘Britishness’ of its creators.  It’s endearing to see the minor touches like cosmetic customization of Terry, or the witty one-liners that appear on each game-over screen. There’s a decent amount of content for casual players to sink their teeth into, and an enjoyable few hours’ worth for those who like to burn through games as fast as possible. But above all else, the game is just good, clean fun that’s easy to pick up and play when you’ve got a few minutes to kill or a lust to shoot bread at things.

Overall Rating: ★★★★★ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose. It was tested on an iPhone 5 running iOS 7.0.4.

Toast Time is out now on IOS and Android for £1.99/$2.99

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Tower of Elements 2 has so many elements smashed up against each other that I’ll be impressed if they all work together seamlessly. The game combines classic city building with real-time strategy combat that mixes together match-3 puzzles and tower defense. All things that sound right up my alley, honestly.

The city building has everything you’d expect from the genre. You choose a continent on which to build your city, with each of the three having its own advantages and disadvantages. From there, you have a variety of building types to choose from, resources to manage, citizens to allocate to different jobs, and policy decisions that affect both your city and your troops on the battlefield.

Actual combat takes the form of match-3 puzzles. Match the runes and elemental bolts blast out from your tower and hit oncoming foes. Other aspects of tower defense games are included, such as building barriers and deploying troops. There will also be a good bunch of challenging bosses to take on, as well as a bestiary from which to view and play around with the various enemy types you encounter. Really, it all looks like a ton of fun.

Having already gone over its goal, Tower of Elements 2 is a safe campaign to pledge towards. $10 is the minimum amount you’ll have to pledge to get a DRM-free copy of the game for PC, Mac, or Linux along with a Steam key if the game is Greenlit. The Kickstarter is getting pretty close to its first stretch goal, which is one that’s actually pretty cool: an alternate board layout. It’d definitely be worth it to unlock this goal as it’d really increase the replayability of the game overall.

Anyway, go on over to the Kickstarter page and pledge towards the game. You can also vote for Tower of Elements 2 on Steam Greenlight, follow its development on Twitter and Facebook, and find out even more on the developer’s website.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Fortify: Special Edition puts players in charge of defending a castle from marauding monsters commanded by a an evil overlord. Enemies approach in waves from all directions of the top-down map, and units can be placed within or outside the castle’s walls to stop its destruction. The campaign mode requires the player to keep the castle standing for the in-game duration of a couple of weeks before finally facing the big, bad, boss man himself. Two additional game modes, Arcade and Multiplayer, extend the playability. Arcade mode ramps the difficulty up to the highest setting to see how many rounds the player can last. Multiplayer (LAN-only) tasks each player with attacking the other player’s castle while still defending their own.

The player’s combat units are represented by various soldier types – including ranged and melee – with different abilities for range, attack power, skills, etc. They are purchased using gold earned by defeating enemies as well as with resources collected on the map (more on that later). Because enemies approach from different directions and each unit has a limited field of view, they must be moved either individually or as a group. This is where a lot of time is spent in the early part of the game, and it is a source of frustration as combat units are fairly dumb. Units will only attack if the enemy is within their f.o.v, even if the enemy is standing right next to them. It eventually becomes less of a problem once enough soldiers are purchased for maximum coverage in all directions.

As with many tower defense games, there’s a decision to made between trying to overwhelm the enemy with sheer numbers versus using valuable resources to purchase upgrades. What helps separate Fortify from lesser games in the genre are the vast number and types of upgrades available. On the lower end of the scale, players can boost the castle’s defenses and add towers to improve offensive stats. Perform enough of these upgrades and that unlocks the ability to move the game – and castle – to newer ages of technological advancement. With those evolutionary changes come new soldier types, new player-executed attack options (i.e. catapult, oil slick), and buildings that open up even more upgrade paths.

Advanced upgrade options will leave foes feeling the heat.

One of my favorite twists on the genre turns the game into a bit more of an RTS. There are three outposts that are located on the map. Each outpost is associated with a different resource – lumber, iron, and stone – and can be mined for that resource with the proper care and attention. A building must first be built on the location, and then workers must be purchased and sent there. Resources are mined incrementally over time as long as there are one or more workers at that location. This all sounds well and good, but it’s not as easy as it seems. These outputs are typically fragile, and since they’re outside the castle’s confines they are open to attack. Workers caught inside when the walls fall are killed. As with the castle, outposts can be upgraded with tougher walls, stronger defense measures, and increased capacity for workers.  So with all of the other issues for the player to contend with, they must also repeatedly decide whether to dump valuable resources – as well as the player’s attention – into the main castle or these outposts.

This factors into the game’s biggest weakness:  the pacing of the difficulty. I’m normally a default-to-Normal kinda guy, but I highly recommend starting at the easiest difficulty setting to get a handle on how the game plays. The early game tends to be the hardest part because the need to constantly adjust the combat units can keep the player from making much – if any – progress towards the longer-term objectives. Some of the individual combat units have special skills or stances that the player can activate, but I found I never had time to use them while they were still useful. There’s simply too much to micromanage, not enough time to assess, and it can lead to frustrating failures. The player can pause the game anytime to get a better look at the battleground and read all of the upgrade options, but that goes against the natural flow of playing an action game. On the flip side, if the player can manage to survive the early onslaught, build and maintain some outposts, and start mining resources, the game pretty much plays itself during the last few days. This problem is nothing new to the genre since the goal of most tower defense games involves creating an undefeatable juggernaut.

Sit back, player. We’ve got this.

Fortify: Special Edition is one of those games where I quickly thought I had my mind made up about it. During the first couple of times I attempted the campaign, I lost and was left with a sour taste in my mouth. It’s easy to become overwhelmed, especially when overestimating one’s own ability to take on a new game in a genre they’re well acquainted with. After easing myself in at a lower difficulty, learning how and when to work towards the long-term goals, and generally just figuring out how to actually play the game, I came away much more satisfied with the experience. I don’t know that this is a game that I’ll keep coming back to once I’ve conquered the harder difficulties, but it’s a solid tower defense game in spite of some issues with the difficulty pacing.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

What does this score mean?

This game was reviewed using a PC copy provided by the developer for that purpose. Version 1.02 was used in this review. It is available for PC and Mac through Desura, GamersGate, and IndieGameStand. The original Fortify is available as a free download from Holgersson Entertainment.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

And it’s a shame to start the review off in such a negative way, because the execution works well and offers some level of fun gameplay. The tower defense section is your standard fare, but it’s executed solidly. Problem is, it can all get a little overwhelming when combined with the action shooting sections. If you compare it to something like FTLgame’s Faster Than Light, which blends tactical play with the general housekeeping of your ship, Straco simply doesn’t hold up as well when merging its two separate elements together.

The heads-up display (HUD) in Straco is an explosion of information that would have benefited from being trimmed down. Perhaps it’s just a personal preference, but the cluttered screen during gameplay is just an eyesore. And between the HUD and the chaos of the general gameplay, you have no idea where to look half the time.

Graphically Straco doesn’t stand out, but ironically that is what makes it different from other similar games. Many games on the XBLA Indie Marketplace try to go way above their level, which means either the gameplay suffers or the artwork looks out of place. Here, the sprites are clean and functional and the background is a patchwork of colours that represent sea, ground, forest and so on. The only shame is that the environment has no effect on your movement or abilities, whether you’re on foot or in the giant mechanical machine. This renders the change of colours more or less useless, but at least it’s better than a 100×100 grid of grey.

It’s understandable that games created by small teams, one or two people will multitask between programming, art, and audio. But that doesn’t excuse how poor and misplaced the soundtrack for this game is. It honestly might have been better to avoid using music altogether and take the Desert Strike route – especially with the helicopter sections.

Straco is by no means a bad game, but it just suffers from trying to spin too many plates at once. The minefield that is the tutorials and controls will turn off many players before they even get halfway through the first mission. And with Straco planned as the first of a series of episodic games, it will be difficult to see each episode garnering any new players. Straco has potential, it just needs major fine-tuning to realise any of that potential.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

This game was reviewed using a copy provided by the developer for that purpose.

© 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

There seem to have been a lot of tower defence games hitting Xbox Live Indie Games recently. Almost without exception, they have potential but are too flawed to be worth recommending. The Indie Mine has already looked at the well presented but otherwise unremarkable Union of Armstrong and the appealing but bug-riddled and barely functional Zombie Crossing. Now we have Spoids, and I wasn’t tremendously optimistic about its chances.

Well, I was wrong. Mostly.

Spoids is easily one of the most professional indie tower defence games I’ve played. It immediately makes a good impression with its outstanding presentation. Though it doesn’t go in for flashy cinematic sequences or pseudo-3D visuals, Spoids feels polished and professional from its opening moments, with a brief voiceover explaining that humanity’s colonised worlds are suddenly being assailed by an alien race dubbed ‘spoids’. It’s not a deep or detailed plot, but it serves its purpose as a justification for the tower defence format, and it’s used throughout to provide reasons for each mission, whether a colony begging for your help or a shady businessman offering to keep you funded in exchange for protection.

Voice acting is present throughout the game, and while this is generally something I’m indifferent to, here it works very well. The briefing for each mission comes in the form of a transmission from your next client, usually imploring you to hold off the spoid assault while they evacuate/retrieve their data/buy their groceries/walk their dog. This has no impact on the way the levels play out, but it’s a nice touch nonetheless, and I couldn’t help being a little less diligent when I was working to defend the shifty opportunist called Mosper while he boosted valuable gear from an abandoned facility.

Your clients also shout out suggestions or recriminations as you carry out your mission. Again this is a welcome touch of polish, and actually helps you notice if some spoids have slipped through the net. Your computer’s comments are far more practical, if less colourful. The types of spoids can be identified by their shape, but I generally can’t remember which ones are which, so having my digital advisor chime in “zoomers approaching” or “faders approaching” gives me a few valuable seconds’ warning to throw down a suitable turret.

This voice acting isn’t fantastic, but it’s leagues ahead of most indie games, and better than many mainstream titles. For the most part it’s at a Gears of War sort of standard – it’s not going to win anyone an Oscar, but it doesn’t feel like a high school drama class either. Some of the accents are a little on the hammy side, but no more so than the average Hollywood representation of non-Americans.

Tower defence games always see you placing turrets to defend against waves of enemies that vastly outnumber you, and Spoids sticks tightly to that formula. It doesn’t offer research options like Zombie Crossing, an ever-shifting attack route like Commander: World One or an open map with divertible assaults like Horn Swaggle Islands. This never feels like a weakness, though. Spoids avoids repetition by introducing a new mechanic, weapon or enemy type after every mission. Even the way this is done is appealing. The information is presented in an Intel directory that is reassuringly similar to Mass Effect’s Codex. This frequent use of the setting before, during and after missions prevents the game feeling like a series of disconnected stand-alone tasks.

Sadly, Spoids does have flaws. Only two as far as I’ve noticed, but one is puzzling and the other is problematic. Firstly, the game’s secondary play mode is hidden. If you perform well enough on a mission to earn a platinum medal you unlock ‘infinite wave’ mode, allowing you to fight off an unending army of spoids for as long as you can. This adds some welcome replayability after completing the main campaign, as you try to perfect your defensive strategy and beat your previous record. Confusingly, there’s no indication as to how to access this mode. It’s not listed in any of the menus or on the title screen, and if you select the mission again it has all the same briefings and objectives as before, including a finite length. In the end I had to ask the developers about it via Twitter, and they told me that if you play a mission for which you’ve unlocked infinite wave mode, it will happen automatically. That’s fine, but continuing to display a time limit for the mission when it doesn’t apply is very confusing, and surely easily remedied.

Secondly, and more importantly, the difficulty curve decided to take the elevator. With new enemies or turrets introduced every mission, the game wastes no time in becoming more complex and more demanding. By level six, you have to manage your turret purchases and placements almost perfectly or you won’t last more than a couple of minutes. Admittedly I’m a mediocre tower defence player at best, but my criticism isn’t that the game is hard – it’s that it shifted from manageably challenging to Battle of Thermopylae hard so suddenly that I got whiplash. Most levels required a few attempts, but I felt like I could see how to improve for the next time. Pretty soon, though, I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth, and then at level six my progress slammed to a halt like someone had erected a concrete wall with ‘no playing beyond this point’ chiselled into it. It took me literally hours of playing this one level over and over before I even got close to succeeding. I’m sure tower defence maestros could overcome this obstacle, but everyone I’ve spoken to had a similar problem at around the same point. This is quite late in the game – the sixth of eight levels – but the change is shockingly sudden. However able you are, the difficulty curve in Spoids is just very badly conceived.

In the end, I give Spoids a recommendation with slight reservations. It would be easy to recommend wholeheartedly on the basis of its professionalism, polish and overall good design if it wasn’t for the bone-shatteringly sharp increase in challenge. Spoids is a good game, and reasonably priced at 240 Microsoft points, but it’s certainly not a game for tower defence novices. By all means play and enjoy it, but be prepared to never finish it.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Now I know how school teachers feel. Not because teachers routinely set up chaingun turrets to contain the influx of shambling students (though I’m pretty sure it crossed my metalwork teacher’s mind from time to time) but because it’s very frustrating to watch someone, or something, with real ability fall on its face because it’s too lazy to try.

Zombie Crossing (formally uncapitalised as zombie crossing – not a good start with a pedant like me) is a tower defence game that benefits from some nice ideas but also suffers badly from some awful design choices and an evident lack of any sort of playtesting.

There are far too many zombie-based games on Xbox Live’s indie channel, but this one actually makes good use of the theme. A zombie apocalypse is a logical basis for a tower defence game, involving as it does hordes of mindless enemies advancing stoically against a beleagued defensive line. The presentation is pretty good, particularly for an Xbox indie. It’s not uncommon for games on this service to look like they were drawn in Microsoft Paint, but this one, while not XBLA standard, has real game-like visuals with character models and convincing environments, plus a couple of nice touches like the blood trail that denotes the horde’s route in the first couple of levels.

Upon first playing Zombie Crossing, my impression of it wasn’t great. Its control scheme is an immediate problem. On top of the awkwardness of navigating the in-game menus using the triggers and D-pad, the left stick control is too responsive for the small size of the spots where you can place turrets, meaning that you often twitch back and forth for several seconds trying to get the cursor in the right place. This is inconvenient enough even pre-attack, but reaches a new infuriating low when you’re trying to add new defences in the middle of battle. The issue finally passes through rock bottom and splashes into the sewer when you try to upgrade a turret; the ‘upgrade’ button is so narrow that its almost impossible to hit. I have yet to successfully upgrade even one turret thanks to this miserable design oversight. Having someone playtest the game for more than five minutes would have revealed this problem, but I assume that never happened.

The turrets also don’t face the way you tell them to. You can rotate each one to aim in a particular direction, but more often than not they will ignore your instruction. It doesn’t sound like a serious problem, but turrets take so long to rotate and open fire that you can end up with legions of them never opening fire because they can’t rotate in time.

This lack of playtesting is evident throughout Zombie Crossing, and the problems I’ve detailed above turn out to be the least of them.

The idea behind Zombie Crossing is a pretty good one. You aren’t just defending against a certain number of waves; you’re trying to amass enough money to purchase a nuclear strike, which will bring a final end to that level and move you on to a new map where you start the process over. Advancing from level to level unlocks extra options in the research menu, enabling you to buy barricades, slowing effects and the like.

As I persisted with Zombie Crossing I began to forgive it for its flawed controls. The research side of things is barely explained, but I soon worked out how it works. The objective is also not explained – the game tells you that you should try to buy a nuke, but makes it sound like a friendly suggestion rather than the aim of the whole game. It took me probably 30-40 minutes to realize that nuclear bombardment is how you progress to the next level. I’d been starting to think the game had only one level! This is a problem, but not a crippling one. Besides, maybe I’m just dense.

The first and cheapest upgrade you can buy is the sniper rifle, which gives you a first-person view from a rooftop, from which vantage you can pop high velocity rounds into the shuffling undead. A nice touch, I thought. Sniping one zombie at a time seemed like it probably wouldn’t be much use in the grand scheme, but it would give me something to occupy myself with while the turrets were doing the serious clean-up.

In the event, that’s not quite how it worked out. This is where the problems begin in earnest.

The sniper rifle is traditionally a precise instrument that fires single bullets into carefully chosen targets. Zombie Crossing‘s sniper rifle is more like a rocket launcher. As long as your bullet hits a zombie, there will be an explosion that rips apart any others standing nearby. Plus it’s a one hit kill across its whole area of effect. The game soon ceases to be a tower defence at all, and instead becomes a case of just bombing crowds of zombies with your ‘sniper’ rifle as they bottleneck at their spawn point, and positioning a couple of towers close by to mop up the handful that get through. Even the larger, tougher boss zombie that appears at the end of each wave keels over much more quickly by thumping a few sniper shots into it than by shredding it with a dozen turrets. So the control problems become irrelevant, as do the upgrades, most of the research and the towers themselves. You start the game with a few hundred dollars; the sniper rifle costs you $100 to buy, and $1 to activate.

This problem becomes less pronounced as you gain extra turret types a few levels in, and the tower-based strategy becomes actually practical. But for the first few levels (which could be either a brief period or quite a long time, depending on how you choose to spend your resources) Zombie Crossing is barely even a game. It’s more ‘click on a few points in one area’. You know what else does that? Your desktop. Desktops aren’t known for being the height of entertainment.

That’s not all. The sniper rifle issue is idiocy of design, but perhaps not the most glaring example of zero playtesting. When you unlock the barbed wire barricade on level 2, you must never use it. It crashes the game. Not once, not twice, but 100% every single time I use it, without fail. You can, with some difficulty, play the rest of the game without using the barricade – it isn’t completely essential – but that isn’t the point. The point is the game is fundamentally broken, and clearly even the developers themselves never actually played it or they would have noticed this.

Again, a total and sickening lack of playtesting before release. Or if it was playtested, it by someone who was out of the room at the time. Maybe in another town entirely.

There are some other problems that could easily have been picked up on too, but they’re small potatoes compared to the game-crushingly huge ones. I’ll give one prominent example though.

If you pause while sniping, the crosshairs disappear and you get just a pointer instead. And you will do this a lot thanks to the need for coins. Zombies often drop gold coins that you can only pick up by pressing the Back button, yet that same button also brings up the pause menu. Every time you try to collect currency the game pauses, which would be bad enough by itself but also immediately draws attention to the vanishing crosshairs. How did anyone think this was a good idea, and why did no one who playtested it say “hey guys, this is really really annoying”? Oh wait, I can guess…

It’s moronic to a degree that left me breathless with horror and despair. In any other game, this oversight alone would be enough to turn a recommendation into a warning. Here, it’s not even the worst offender.

It’s a terrible shame. The game looks and sounds good, its atmosphere works, the research idea could have been fun, and it seems to be a decent length (though the levels start repeating after an hour or so). The sniper feature is a nice addition in principle, and even with some flaws the game could have been worth a recommendation. I really tried to enjoy it, and at the times when the menagerie of glitches, bugs and design ineptitude weren’t leaping out to punch my enjoyment in the face, it was pretty fun. I don’t want to emphatically tell you not to buy it. If you’re forewarned, you might have fun with it.

But at the same time, I can’t recommend it, particularly as the Xbox indie scene doesn’t lack good tower defence games. As a retail product, this is unsuitable to be on sale. It’s a first draft. I read, check and edit my reviews repeatedly before they reach the public eye, but Zombie Crossing doesn’t extend the same courtesy. I even tried to contact the developers to give them a chance to patch it before I stuck the boot in, but I couldn’t find any contact details or even a Facebook page. Always be reachable, developers.

Zombie Crossing could have done well for itself if it had been released in a finished and tested state, but as teachers often say, “must try harder”. Or as my metalwork teacher always said, “I am a violent man!” After a missed opportunity like this, he should be.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Tower defense games have seen some notoriety over the years in terms of commercial and critical success like the ubiquitous Plants vs. Zombies. At the same time, it’s a genre that has largely remained unchanged for years. In order to stand out from the crowd, developers must now find a way to put a different spin on a classic gameplay design. With the recent release of Union of Armstrong on Xbox Live Indie Games, development studio Domain of the Infinite has attempted to supplement standard tower defense mechanics with a unique setting, minor gameplay tweaks, and ambitious presentation additions. However, in trying to do something new, some of the core design elements haven’t received the attention they need.

Union of Armstrong is set in the future on the surface of the moon. You’re tasked with defending the Apollo 11 landing site from being taken over by an evil mining corporation, Luna. Your conflict with the enemy takes place in both a tower defense style battle structure, as well as in some brief conversational dialogue trees in between rounds. The tower defense genre isn’t particularly known as a powerhouse of storytelling, so it’s nice that Domain of the Infinite saw fit to include a unique fictional setup.

The tower defense design of the game is fairly simplistic, and intentionally so according to the developer. Your base is centrally located on the screen and, depending on what level of the game you’re in, there may be anywhere from one to four paths leading to it. Tower selection is limited to three types: a standard unidirectional attack tower, a more costly 4-directional attack tower, and a tower for slowing enemy progress. You can divert any of your ‘Resources’, ‘Defense’, and ‘Power’ units between each other at any time. Towers are purchased using ‘Resources’ which are earned by defeating enemies. Every tower uses up ‘Power’ so you must ensure that your ‘Power’ units don’t  get completely depleted. At the same time, you have a ‘Defense’ rating that indicates how much health your base has left. Once it runs out the game is over. Unfortunately, you can’t select how much of a particular item to shift, you simply move all of that category to another.

There are a few other issues with the basic mechanics. To remove a tower, you must remove the most-recently placed tower first, then the one before that and so on. You can’t directly select a particular tower for removal. It’s a frustrating design choice, particularly when making poor tower placement choices as you’re first getting used to the game. Overall, the game felt particularly easy as well. This may be attributed to the fact that as an experienced tower defense gamer I was already acclimated to common strategies involving which type of towers to place and where. The first half of the game felt far too easy, and even on the later levels I was able to lay down enough towers early so that I could just sit back and watch the carnage.  A lack of diversity in enemy types means that players can find one strategy and just stick with it the entire game.

But in a nice twist on the tower defense genre, the base has a shield capability which can be activated at any time. The tradeoff is that turning on the shield will drain your ‘Power’. It’s a necessary evil though as a large enemy ship will periodically approach off-rails to directly attack your base before flying off. The shield can also be employed when enemy units get past your towers. So not only do you have to manage the standard tower defense mechanics, but you also have to keep an eye on your base. I really like this design choice, but I wish more variety had been introduced with it. Having the ship approach from different directions or attacking in a different way would’ve kept it from getting stale before the end of the game.

What really separates Union of Armstrong from other tower defense games is the attention placed on the elements not directly involved in the gameplay. Because this is a war-themed game, in some ways it makes sense that a news ticker is running at all times along the bottom of the screen. At the same time, when a game requires your constant attention it doesn’t make much sense to add something that the user won’t even be able to view and enjoy while playing.  Also included is a radio network that airs in the background. It’s obvious that a lot of attention was paid to creating this immersive experience, but it is a mishmash of styles. Old WWII-style entertainment shows combined with robotically-voiced commercials and modern day rock music don’t fit with each other let alone the futuristic, space-based theme. It’s easy to see and appreciate that the studio was trying to give the game some personality, but some of these missteps keep these features from being great additions.

Union of Armstrong was reviewed using a copy of the game provided by the developers.

Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆ 

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