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Tower Defense games SUCK! Except for Bloons. And Gemcraft. Oh, and especially…
Defender’s Quest is a tower defense game with high energy. The world is infested with an incurable plague. Without much ado, you are introduced to the main character–a girl who is dying. Before she expires, she’s carried off and thrown into the pit of dead and dying bodies where all the sick get cast. Upon running into a fellow infested, the infested goes berserk, forcing the girl to fight back. Summoning strength from an untapped part of her spirit, she summons herself to the “halfway place,” a realm between the dead and the living. Calling with her mind to the nearest hero, she summons a sarcastic berserker to her side to protect her.
Along the way, she travels with her companions, picking up more as she goes as the party tries to both escape from the pit and fight off the revenant and humans alike that infest it. The writing is fun, the pacing is fast and art is stylistic with a nice range of poses for each character portrait.
The actual Tower Defense part of the game isn’t anything you haven’t seen before, but it’s extremely clean and introduced a piece at a time so as not to overwhelm the player. All of the pieces are customizable, and not just their skills and stats (although there’s plenty of that to upgrade). You can customize each piece’s name and color, allowing the player to have some fun creating a party and growing attached to certain pieces they favor. In normal fashion, I named the girl Midia, the berserker Destry (due to his rather thief-like nature) and so on in that fashion with Paladin’s Quest characters.
There’s so much good going for this game. Great music, great atmosphere, a fast-moving story and fun characters. It was hard for me not to put this in Tier 1. I’m settling for Tier 2 though for one simple fact–it’s still just a tower defense game. Sure, it’s easy to get carried away with the exciting slashing, tiny animations and bite-sized monsters walking along on the screen but even on the first level, I found myself plotting down my units and cranking the speed to x16 and watching the game play itself out. Tower Defense games can be addictive… but I can’t ever help but feel I’ve wasted my time after playing one to the end. That being said, this one is fantastic–if you’re in the market for one, try this out.
