Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Immortal Defense

[quote name="Mischief Maker"]<A HREF="http://studioeres.com/immortaldefense/" TARGET="new">Immortal Defense</A> is a new Tower Defense-style game and it's probably the best "enemies follow a set path" TD game yet. An alien invasion fleet is traveling through a hyperspace jump to attack the good guys. You are a being who exists at a higher dimension than hyperspace who can move around the comparatively 1 dimensional hyperspace path, attacking and placing defensive towers with impunity. Probably the first game of its type that has a halfway-decent excuse for why the enemy is marching single-file down the same path through your meatgrinder. The "ascending to a higher plane of existence" theme coupled with the game's minimal strings and guitar soundtrack reminds me of the spaceman scenes from "The Fountain" for no good reason. The main two things to recommend this game are its terrain and its large variety of turrets. The shape of the hyperspace path affects the speed at which enemies move. They accelerate down straight ways but are slowed sugnificantly by curves and kinks. This means your defense isn't completely hinged on enemy-slowing turrets and there's more to placement than just trying to maximize road space falling within your attack radii. I've seen more than half the turrets in the game and I'm impressed by their variety. There are no "certain enemies are immune to this tower type" cop-outs to artificially increase variety. You get turrets that stop enemies and drop their armor rating to zero for a moment, Long range but slow-firing shotgun turrets, turrets that gain experience with kills, group-damaging turrets that can only fire in 4 directions, turrets that extend a deadly foce field between them, and more. On the downside, the graphics consist of nice minimal vector gfx with some passable-to-ugly sprites. Also, you place and upgrade towers with this weird drag and drop system where you need to hold the tower in place for a half second for it to "click" before you can let go and place it. Note that the author has stated that upgrading the game sprites is one of his priorities for the next patch. Do not raise the "effects" slider past the default level because the in-game effects will completely obscure the action. The game proceeds in small missions about 3 minutes in length where the high score from the previous mission determines how much money you start the next level with. In addition to your towers, hovering your cursor over enemies will pepper them with rapid fire attacks so the game never enters the "set up your towers, sit back and pray until the next money influx" dead time that affects most tower defense games. Plus the levels (so far) are all done in less than 5 minutes which is nice if you want to play some tower defense but don't have time for a 40 minute desktop tower defense epic. There are 10 difficulty levels, but I found that the extra money you get at the higher levels counterbalances the increased resilience of the enemies. Note that this game's demo is BEEFY. 30 some levels out of the full game's 90-some with access to all 10 difficulty levels. You could probably squeeze 3-5 hours out of this demo if so inclined. <FONT COLOR="000000">Everybody please click the link, I get a discount if the author sees 15 unique IPs link over from clatrpos.</FONT>[/quote]