MarZ: Tactical Base Defense

The game has very good art and sounds which create an immersive atmosphere. The game mechanics are very solid, although a bit repetitive. The concept is hybrid between RTS and Tower Defense with concepts from both: there is no enemy base to attack, kills earn money, enemies come from fixed directions but follow straight paths, there is research tree and reinforcements that must be constantly kepts going. The micromanagement is much less than RTS and much higher than Tower Defense. The only really weak point is the story, there is a nice buildup of mistery and then it all falls flat leaving some significant gaps. Some people find the game challenging and I don't think it is easy, but the tutorial skips very important fundamentals, so here are some tips: - you can dynamically adjust the game speed, from the controls, I set the slow-motion and regular speed to the space-bar and then I can play with pause option similar to FTL or Dragon Age - keep asking for reinforcements, that's the only way to keep all towers manned, moving crew around and leaving inactive towers is sometimes necessary, but it can and should be avoided with enough reinforcements - in RTS games it is good to spread out your base and grab as much territory and vision as possible, but here you have full vision at all times and keeping the defenses close to the lander allows for cross fire where towers from multiple energy pads guard each approach

Well, the Game is pretty much a tower Defense. You get units to man the towers and other buildings or to fire with their automatic weapons on the enemy waves. The idea is, that you have to switch the units in and out of your turrets, refineries and research labs to mine minerals, defend your base or get new tech for better buildings. But you can build new troops in most missions, so this isn't really any problem. At least for the 18 out of 20 missions where you have the option to do so. You still would have a solid TD with a somewhat ok story but the game lacks in controls. For some reason they ditched the standard controls for RTS games since 1997 or so. Instead you got -to move your units with left click -invisible walls on the map where you simply can't click at all which makes microing units even harder -no option to group units -often problems with deselecting stuff (this gets frustrating when you have to build and micro stuff at the same time) These weird and bad controls make microing rly hard but you have to micro against certain units if you want to not lose your towers or units for the perfect score. But even with all those problems, which solely work against the player, the game rly isn't challenging if you don't go for 100% every mission, even on highest difficulty. There were two missions that got kinda hard. One because you couldn't get additional troops and the last level which i don't want to spoil. It took me 8hours to finish the game.

It's a very fun tower defense game mixed up with some tactic and strategy. You defend multiple lanes which all have an indicator where the next threats come from. But you do not have enough resources to defend all lanes at once. Therefore you must adjust your tactics and shift your resources to the current threat. This can be challenging sometimes but levels are not too long and if you lose you have the urge to try it again with a different tactic. The difficulty may seem hard sometimes but as I mentioned before adjusting your tactics and earning a victory make it so much sweeter. On top of that the graphics, sound and overall presentation are very well done and you get a mysterious zombie sci-fi story (I am not at the end but it’s entertaining so far). What do you want more? ...Actually there is more if you are done with the campaign you can play endlessly in skirmish and even build your own levels.

The game is a very solid and fun Tower Defense with some extra micro management. The campaign has 20 missions. There is also skirmish mode and a map editor. It took me 11 hours to beat the campaign on the default "challenge" difficulty (earning 80% of the achievements in the process). Around 30% of the missions required more than one attempt. After failing the last mission a couple of times I went back to unlock more perks and then barely made it. The game looks and sounds very nice. The story is OK. The Tower Defense mechanics are done well. Towers do what you would expect them to. You can adjust the game speed during the level to speed up the easy parts but handle the difficult parts in slow motion. Unit micro management is clunky and takes some getting used to. The units often don't do exactly what you want, sometimes you can't click in some places or buildings until you re-select the unit. All missions except one allow you to set the camera very high up and comfortable, but that one mission forces a lower angle which makes the controls significantly worse and annoying. During the 11 hours of playtime I encountered only a couple of bugs the most annoying of which is that on later missions the energy hubs sometimes think they use more energy than they actually do preventing you from making more buildings. This mostly happens when you build multiple things at the same time or upgrade/move the energy hub. The music sometimes breaks. The game crashed only once. Overall I enjoyed playing it, will probably play some more to get the remaining achievements. It's worth the price, especially on sale. If you're not sure check out the demo!