I don’t know if anyone has made this into a game yet, but the climactic fight in Avengers: Age of Ultron is a tower defense level. Avoiding spoilers: the Avengers end up protecting a button. If one enemy gets past them to push the button, the bad guys win. Arrange the Avengers around this button … Continue reading Avengers Tower Defense
While I’m waiting for the wild pendulum swings of post-release re-balancing to slow down in Dungeon Defenders, a FPS/tower defense game is the free promo of the weekend on Steam: Sanctum. Having gone through a first map, it feels a lot like Defense Grid with a hero unit. That hero unit makes a lot of … Continue reading More Action Tower Defense
The challenge game of the week at Kongregate is a tower defense game with a backstory about galactic conflict, war, billions dead, yaddah yah. At some point, you realize that the waves of purple stuff are the Smooze from My Little Pony: The Movie, which kind of gives the entire game a different feeling. I … Continue reading My Little Pony Tower Defense
Having noticed that our readers include a great many fans of tower defense games, the maker of Toytown Tower Defense asked for feedback on why his game might not have been well received. Or let’s put that in less polite terms: it is rated just below 3.5 on Kongregate, when some real garbage clears 4. … Continue reading Reader Critique Requested: Toytown Tower Defense
Consider as a case study three variations on the same type of game: Desktop TD Pro Gemcraft Chapter 0 Protector III Each has that familiar gameplay that you know I love: building defenses that blow up armies of mindlessly marching monsters. Each has taken it in a rather different direction. (Each is far longer than … Continue reading Flash Variations on a Theme: Tower Defense
In this month’s application of educational theory to gaming, let’s talk about scaffolding. Scaffolding is providing successive levels of support and difficulty to develop capacity and mastery. This should be a familiar concept for gaming, where we have literal levels that usually move from a simple tutorial to greater complexity. Games are increasingly being used … Continue reading Scaffolding
My game of the weekend has been Kingdom. It is enjoyable and difficult. In Kingdom, you are a monarch on a horse who solves problems by throwing money at them. Literally, you have a bag of gold, and your only action is to put money somewhere: recruit peasants, buy them equipment, upgrade buildings. It is … Continue reading Kingdom: Classic
After many dungeon runs in Hearthstone, I decided that I liked this idea of roguelike deckbuilder games and picked up Slay the Spire. It was exactly what I wanted, and I immediately enjoyed a four-hour binge. A great virtue of Slay the Spire is that it is designed to be what it is. The Hearthstone … Continue reading Higher in the Spire
I finished playing through Evil Defenders. It is a tower defense game for PC or mobile; I played PC. It is somewhat entertaining, but either you like tower defense and have already played better or have not and should play better. If you liked Kingdom Rush and want more levels of a worse version, pick … Continue reading Evil Defenders
I have several casual games going at the moment. They give a range of grind. Two are idle games, which grind themselves. One is Pathfinder Adventures, where I rejoice in the grind. The grind here is simply playing the game. Of course, that is always what grind is; I think of “grind” as when you … Continue reading Grinding