A Gaming Diary
Star Defense Prelude (iPhone)
This is the Lite version of Star Defense, basically, but I believe it acts as a prequel to the main game. It’s a fixed path tower defense game, with the twist being that the levels are set on small, spherical asteroids, so you have to rotate them around to see different parts of the level.
At first, this is exceptionally annoying and feels like a willful way to make the game harder simply by limiting your information, or maybe just an example of technology being given precedence over game design. After a few minutes, though, you get used to it and it starts to make sense. Yes, it does make the game harder than if you could flatten it out and see the whole level at once, but learning the path and rotating frantically to get where you need to be becomes part of the fun of it all.
It’s all pretty standard, with the normal selection of towers and creeps with the usual statistics and resistances, but it feels a lot more involving than many other games of its type. I didn’t often find myself sitting back after having set up my defenses and waiting for the creeps to get slaughtered. I was always spinning around, trying to find the optimum spot for new towers and making hard decisions about whether it was better to spend a lot of money on upgrades or small amounts on new low-power towers.
Basically, it works and after the bad first impressions I’ve become very fond of it. The full version of the game is currently 59p, but I won’t be playing it until I’ve beaten the single level included in this version on Medium difficulty. I can get to the final wave, but can’t quite hold on long enough to win.
Print article | This entry was posted by That Rev Chap on October 26, 2009 at 11:26 am, and is filed under iPhone. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |