Defender's Quest

I picked this one on a whim last year while it was still in beta, and it hooked me for a solid couple of weeks. It is a very entertaining and quite playable mash-up of tower defense strategy and role-playing - with a believable rationale to explain the combination. The customized leveling-up of characters as you play means that, over time, your different units of the same 'class' have quite different abilities. However, you are limited in your energy to summon them and 'power them up' to their full potential on the battlefield. So you can't get away with just summoning your most powerful party members and leave it at that. And of course, there's a storyline to follow, plenty of loot and artifacts to equip your characters with, and a couple of different endings... Good RPG fare. If you are a tower defense fan - especially one who enjoys RPGs - or an RPG fan who also enjoys strategy games - this is a must for your library. If you are more of an action-RPG gamer, then your mileage may vary, but it's worth checking out.

Great game, tonnes of replay value. The challenge of the levels is well-paced. You'll probably get most of the way through, realize you want more of a challenge, and decide to re-do the game trying for one of the achievements (like only using story characters). Playing the hardest levels, with only story characters, provides a ridiculously hard final challenge, and a tremendous sense of accomplishment. As a TD game, it's great. Everything you'd expect. As an RPG, you have enough choices to really change the way your units behave. Lots of "expert" tweaks you can use on your units too. Awesome!

I haven't finished it yet, but this game is a great deal of fun. The humor is refreshing and I love all the cast of characters in the party. I appreciate even more the fact that I can change the percentages of rewards and xp and penalties on the fly for whatever I want. It adds a layer of fun and customizability that I love. To the developer, larsuisprime: please, please make an 'AIR-less' version of the game. I'd love it even more if you did!

This game is absolutely mesmerizing. The battles feel very strategic and it almost hypnotic watching them progress. There a six different unit types with different advantages, while the ability to customize the skill points of each unit within the type adds still more diversity. Within the battle, you have to decide which units go where, and how much to "boost" each unit. Boosting the unit gives it bonuses to attack and access to higher level abilities, but it can get fairly expensive. As you defeat enemies, you get more energy (called PSI in game), so you can summon/boost more of your units. There are a wide variety of different enemy types and maps, each requiring a different strategy to defeat. This makes each battle unique and ensures that you never stumble on a single strategy that wins all maps. The difficulty balance is amazing and fits with multiple gameplay styles. If you want, you can go through each level sequentially and see how the story unfolds. But each map has its own difficulty choice, with greater rewards for higher challenge, so I found myself going back to replay earlier levels at "Advanced" and "Extreme" difficulties. Eventually I found myself going through levels the first time on advanced or extreme, but I never got to the point where a level seemed trivial the first time through. Also, there is a different enemy mix on higher difficulty, so it sometimes requires an entirely different strategy to beat the same level. This makes for a varied and fun play experience. You don't really have to worry about getting stuck, because there is an easy "Casual" difficulty if you just want to get past a stage and see the story. All in all a great game.

The pixel art graphic of TD phases are far from what I am used to. But it is deadly efficient and reminds me of retro gaming. God that's good... And addictive too ! Having added a RPG phase with a real scenario is just making the whole game even better. Very very good work !