Tower Defense

Age of Defenders is a nicely executed, but very conventional, tower defense game, with two unusual aspects: It's both multiplatform and multiplayer. Well, two-player.

It can be played on a computer for free, in Flash; and there are clients for both iOS and Android. Given the size of the play area, my guess is it works better on a tablet than a smartphone, although you can swipe across the play area fairly easily. On the server side, the game is platform agnostic, meaning you could be playing against an opponent on any platform.

The fact that it's multiplayer adds a strategic aspect missing in soloplay tower defense games; you use the same resources to build offensive units as defensive towers, so you make a tradeoff between one or the other. Essentially, you stockpile units until you release them in an attack, when they try to run the gauntlet of the enemy's defenses and inflict damage on their base. Base hit points don't regenerate, but with two defense-minded players, the game can go on quite a long time.

Sweatshop is a game dramatizing the plight of Third World sweatshop workers, created by Littleloud for the BBC's Channel 4, in the form of a tower defense game.

That is, the creeps are items being manufactured and move along a conveyor; the towers are sweatshop laborers, who "add work" to each item until it is complete, and if too many incomplete items get to the end of the belt, you lose the level, and are berated by your obnoxious boss.

You can, of course, increase the speed of the belt to make your workers work faster, and in later levels, you must also do things like place water coolers strategically so they don't keel over from dehydration. Workers can become badly injured on the line, and even die.

I've been playing this game all week and it wrecked me like a dying hooker with a heart of gold and pregnant with the third child. But maybe I relate to Tower Defense games in a weird way.

There's so much polish here for a game made by three people, the illustrated graphics of course grab you, but this title does so much to flourish this genre's craft, it's like the oblong cousin of Immortal Defense, doing what you would expect, only much more so.

Orcs Must Die is a hybrid, an active tower defense game where you setup an automated defense systems -- typical of the tower defense genre but with the twist that you are an active part of the defense. Anything that breaks through your gauntlet of traps must be shot, blasted, or cut down by you, in a first or third person perspective. Robot Entertainment describes Orcs Must Die as a third person tower defense game.

RIZK is a casual, serious, reverse tower defense game. It is part of the British Museum of Science's "Climate Changing..." exhibition, designed as a medium for "exploring the science of climate change." The game has short scenarios in which you invade regions to acquire purple goo resources to grow the tree at your base. In typical RTS fashion, you start with a base where you create two types of units -- harvesters and defenders. Various harvesters are specialized in collecting goo -- e.g., from underground reservoirs or from goo falls. The defender units generate a shield bubble that can protect the harvesters or your base. The goo is guarded by tree tower defense units that hurl homing shuriken-like projectiles. Your goal is to cost effectively deploy appropriate defenders and harvesters to collect goo to grow the tree at your base.

Finally a Facebook game that makes you feel like you're on Kongregate! See those blood splatters in the header pic? That's monster blood, the result of killing via explosives and projectile launches. See that array of buildings? That's a non-decorative arrangement I used to express myself, with concerns for both architecture style and radius coverage of my peremeter, which has been optimized - optimized! - to cluster AI paths into areas of maximum overlap. In this game I was allowed to make decisions which affected my success relative to everyone else in a matter that was challenging. Surely italics are better than quotation marks for placing "sardonic" emphasis?

Finally a Facebook game that makes you feel like you're on Kongregate! See those blood splatters in the header pic? That's monster blood, the result of killing via explosives and projectile launches. See that array? That's a non-decorative arrangement I expressed myself through, with concerns for both architecture style and radius coverage of my peremeter, which has been optimize - optimized! - to cluster AI paths into areas of maximum overlap. In this game I was allowed to make decisions which affected my success relative to everyone else in a matter that was challenging. Surely italics are better than quotation marks for placing "sardonic" emphasis?

Yes, the folks at Casual Collective, makers of really neat multiple experiences like Buggle and featuring the maker of Kongregate breakout-hit Desktop Tower Defense, have applied their hybrid of depth and accessibility to that "space" where traditional designers have feared to tread but where angels tread quite freely (the investor variety): The Facebook. Now you can open that book of faces and proceed to start breaking said faces by spawing groups of home-brewed monsters at the door-step of other folks' tower defense arrays. If you succeed in overwhelming you can raid resources in order to grow your tower-defended base even faster. They take the chestnut of setting a timer and coming back for a reward and granulate it to a wide spectrum of time ranges, upgrade this building for 20 minutes, this one over two hours, research this monster for a day, harvest some putty in an hour and a half of the collector will be too full to continue - somehow this juggling act, in contrast to the optimal appointment that games like Farmville or Cafe World offer, appeals to the epic-compulsive drive of the active competitor or manager-type gamer. However according to their chart, people burn out on that and the resulting ratio of daily to monthly players is lower than you'd expect from a demanding strategy game.

The PvP is pretty fun as you raid someone multiple times and they start hitting back, so you reflexively get into these petty rivalries with folks you've never met - would like to see more with my actual friends, structured local leaderboards, short-term races to a goal milestone, alliances and wars and tournaments. But maybe they can roll that stuff out, at 200k DAU they're pulling prolly like 5k a day so they're probably holding onto positive operating-margins with this thing and you're going to see some new stuff roll out over time.

As far as the early game goes, I admire their boldness in not folding to the mainstays of Facebook game design. The interface is kind of a mess from a "casual" (or is that casual) point of view, but they just trust you to deal with it. Most notably, the focal mechanic of the game, attacking other players, doesn't become accessible until after a few days of active play, they even give you 14 days explicitedly when you start up. This kind of commitment, as fickel as it may seem to those who have losts years to MMORPGS, is staggering for a social game.

But hey man, at least we have a game where you can post a newsfeed that isn't totally hokey, and maybe even inspire some badass admiration as you start unlocking that hardcore, high-level monster and warn your friends. I Like that.

From a host of contracted developers, including the creator of Super Energy Apocalypse and some academic advisers, comes the most delightful chromosome synthesis ever achieved between game design and the rutting instinct of spreading a message through the most trendy medium available. You control a cell in a petri dish, the subject of experiments by duck-billed platypusses (platypi?) trying to create a microscopic cloning vessel to save their species from an impending meteor. Humor about grant funding ensues, along with a more cartoonish twist on HAL 9000, with writing that is uncharacteristically good for a game of this origination, or really for games in general.

Ultimul is a tower defense game, but a little different from the norm. Most TD games either have fixed paths that enemies must follow (ala Immortal Defense) or an open area that you segment with your towers to force enemies to traverse a winding path, and be subject to fire (ala Desktop Tower Defense). In Ultimul, you're defending a space station against waves of attacking enemy ships, who move left-to-right, and path isn't really relevant.

I quite miss turn-based strategy games like XCom and Jagged Alliance, a genre that's pretty much disappeared from the world. Back2Back isn't one, and it doesn't quite satisfy the same jones, but at least in tenseness and overall aesthetic, it's along the same lines.

It's a level-based game; in each level, you control a handful of space marines in a fortified area at screen center, with waves of bug-like attackers moving slowly toward you from the cardinal directions.