Posts tagged with “defense”

Dinosaur fans, rejoice! We’re incredibly excited to announce our brand new game, Go Home Dinosaurs! We’ve been working really hard on this for the past few months and we can’t wait to show it off for the first time next week at PAX in Seattle. Gonna be attending the show? Then be sure to stop by our booth and try it out! We’ll right in Indie Alley and next to the PAX 10 in booth 6408.

But what’s this? You want to know about the game? Well wonder no more! Go Home Dinosaurs! (GHD! to the cool kids) is a fun new take on tower defense where players fit together puzzle piece shaped weapons powered by small, cute mammals to defend against invading, mischievous dinosaurs. Gophers shooting lasers! Pterodactyls attempting to crash your BBQ! METEORS RAINING DOWN FROM THE HEAVENS! Oh, and did we mention that you can level up your character and gain new dino destroying abilities by collecting and trading cards? It’s true!

This game has it all, blending short, simple, easy-to-get-into fun with deep mechanics that keep things exciting and new. Pack your bags dinos, ’cause you’re going home!

This should come as no surprise: We like Tower Defense games. They’re a great little time waster, and they are surprisingly addictive. Some of the variants are completely derivative, while the best ones introduce a new twist or two to keep things innovative and exciting.

So it should carry some real weight when I say that Ghost Hacker by Core Sector is probably the most polished, and certainly one of the most enjoyable, tower defense games I’ve ever seen. The game is just dripping with attention to detail, and I’m super impressed with how much effort must have gone into making it. Let’s discuss what makes it awesome:

• The game has a programming/hacking aesthetic which I can’t help but eat up as a nerd.
• The neon on black visuals are quite eye catching, and the game is a pleasure to look at.
• There is a great level progression with 25 levels that slopes gently and keeps you constantly engaged. The game rarely feels too hard or too easy.
• The enemies in the game feel distinct and enjoyable. There’s a huge number of them, and it’s always fun figuring out how to deal with new enemy types.
• The game is short and sweet. You can probably beat the whole thing in 2 or 3 hours if you are good. At no point did I feel like the game was just “rehashing” the same crap and wasting my time (like most TD games).
• The mechanic for getting new types of towers works really well, as you unlock new abilities and towers steadily throughout the game. It’s a bit top heavy as the later game weapons and abilities far out shadow the early game stuff, but this is a minor gripe. And it’s fun to go back and destroy earlier levels with high end weapons.
• The mechanic for improving your towers is a blast. Each tower has 2-4 “upgrade” nodes that can be augmented with extra abilities. All the abilities are interchangeable, so you can pretty much turn any tower into any other tower. This allows for lots of customization and strategy, and feels very natural. I’ve never seen this in a TD game before and I really like it.
• If you beat the game there is a bonus mode where you get to play as the creeps. AWESOME
• However, the best part of the game is the currency system. Normally in TD you have to plan out what you build because sell back only gets you a fraction of what you spent. Not in this game! Sell back gets you ALL your money back, just with a brief delay on time. In fact, all actions (like special abilities) result in you getting your money back after a little while. So the game becomes more about timing than about always having the exact right amount of money. You can even move your towers for free with just a small cooldown! This change may not sound major, but it makes the game so much more enjoyable. than standard tower defense.

All of these points make Ghost Hacker stand out heads and shoulders above the tower defense crowd. In fact, my only real (minor) complaint is the plot they try to interject between levels, luckily you can quickly skip it by clicking through.

If you like TD games at all you need to go give this one a shot. Enjoy!

I spent the day at the beach yesterday, and decided to muscle in on Ethan’s territory and start with some sand castles. Here is our first one of the summer, a game we call Sand Castle Tower Defense. As you can see we’re up to our necks in creeps, and building towers to defend as quickly as possible.

That is, until the tide comes in and kills everything.

Props to Keith Brown and Sam Ribnick for helping me build this.

A well placed water tower would destroy those sand balls, but a fire tower would be ideal for the seaweed monsters. Maybe we should have played on a harder map?

Tower Defense has somehow become its own genre lately, and what an addicting genre it is. The games center around preventing enemies, or creeps, from traveling from thier source/spawnpoint to your sink/base by building upgradable, stationary attack towers. They also tend to have a terrific sense of flow, as it’s all you can do to keep up with the never-ending waves of enemies while building up your defenses. Because of the hightened sense of flow it’s easy to waste hours upon hours playing them, so be careful with this one.

You see, GemCraft is a highly polished TD game with distinct stages, a “level up” mechanic for improving your stats, and a much needed save function as the game is easily several hours long even if you’re good. The most interesting thing though is the importance of color. All weapons (gems) in the game have a hue value, and gems are especially effective against enemies of opposite hue. So an orange gem works well on blue enemies, and a green gem works nicely on red creeps. The game gets really good when you start “mixing” gems to make them more powerful and combine colors, bonus stats, and of course change the hue value. It’s hard to explain, but great once you start playing.

Be warned, the game is highly addictive.