Colony Defense is a tower defense game made by Manabomb.  A familiar premise, but Manabomb makes a truly fun game that will keep you on your toes while you prevent the Suona from breaking through your gauntlet of defensive turrets and devastating your colonies. Each level has at least one landing zone where the invaders will drop vehicles at and a set path that they will follow to the objective you have to defend.

Throughout the game you’ll be in control of a character who constantly orbits the planet which allows for the ease of orbiting with the W,A,S,D controls to navigate. Each Alien that pops through your defenses kills a colonist, and you only have 10 on each level which can make some games short when there are more colonies on a given planet.  You may place your towers anywhere along the path the enemies travel down and can choose from a total of three in the beginning. There are 10 towers total which are unlocked at varying points in the game. After each level you can also put acquired skill points into certain attributes that will aid you in the game such as land damage, rate of fire, and tower cost. These are also tiered off which means that before you can upgrade your air damage you must purchase all of the land damage points (5 total). You get one attribute point for beating a level and another if you don’t lose a single colonist. There isn’t much time between waves, if any, either so continuous movement is the key.

Each of the 10 available towers cost a varying amount of resources which are acquired by destroying enemies. Some of the said towers are only buffers to other towers such as the rate of fire tower. Towers are also upgradable and will often have to be upgraded because of one great feature in the game, which is the more a certain tower is used the more resistance an enemy gains to it over time. You are always warned about enemy resistances developing which allows you to plan accordingly, but since you have to upgrade each tower individually time gets taken away from defense effectively adding a temporary difficulty spike. Some of the longer battles may see you upgrading a tower 3 or 4 times before selling it to use a different tower type.  This makes the game more difficult in certain areas because sometimes the resources for upgrades just aren’t there so management is vital. There are many combinations of destruction available which are aided by the pop up messages before each battle that let you know what kind of enemies will be heading your way, and occasionally a tower recommendation (which can be extremely helpful). These messages aid greatly as far as initial placement goes, and will make your first few waves easier as you start to expand your defensive grid.

The game has a good soundtrack that seems to impress a bit of mild urgency on you as you scramble to place your towers in the 15-20 seconds before the waves start coming in. Each tower has a different sound that fits well with what it does, such as the crashing sound that the artillery makes as it hits the ground, but you will have tweak how loud it comes off in the options menu because the music seems to overpower the action at certain points.

The game kind of trails off in a few areas though. The planets seem fairly lifeless for the most part, but chances are you will overlook this because some levels don’t give you a whole lot of time to enjoy the scope of each planet. The keyboard control scheme works, but it would be best played with a controller since the joysticks would aid in the planet scrolling. The keyboard controls seem a bit slower because it’s easier to gauge sensitivity by pressing the stick slightly to the left as opposed to just barely tapping E over and over. This adds considerable difficulty whenever you can’t quite get a tower placement spot down or you accidentally edge over it 2 or 3 times before you finally get what you want. You also can’t see what is going on at all points across your planet which means that you may start losing a level fairly quickly because you forgot or overlooked a certain drop point. These are only minor annoyances compared to how much you will be engaged in the game due to its fast-paced, high concentration gameplay and amusing path design. The game is great for casual play here and there, but can be very challenging from time to time.

Tags: Colony Defense, Defense, Galactic, Planetary, Space Invader, Tower

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 8:40 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.