Posts Tagged ‘tower defense’

Plants vs. Zombies

Monday, June 15th, 2009
Plants vs. Zombies: A Busy Gamer 5 of 5

Plants vs. Zombies: A Busy Gamer 5 of 5

First Glance:
A new take on the tower defense sub-genre, pitting some uncommon plants against brain hungry zombies.

The Short Story:
Grow a garden of destruction to fend off hordes of ghoulish undead. The further into the game you get, the more destructive the plant life becomes but the zombies are no slouches either. You’ll come up against some pretty unique, and tough, versions of the undead in PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies.

The Score:
PopCap has always been good at creating addictive, easy to learn, Busy Gamer friendly games but I have to say that they’ve outdone themselves with Plants vs. Zombies. Quick rounds are easy to get in, it’s easy to learn as you play through the adventure mode, and exiting to the main menu at any time automatically saves the game for you allowing you to pick up wherever you left off last. Plants vs. Zombies earns itself a flowery, yet spooky, 5 on the Busy Gamer scale.

Body of review:
I’ve always had something of a soft spot for PopCap games. I can’t even count the number of hours I spent playing Bookworm, Chuzzle, or Peggle. But even with that soft spot, I would have to say I was caught off guard by the addictive nature of Plants vs. Zombies.

On the surface, it’s a “tower defense” game, a structured area where you have a limited amount of space to build your defenses to fend off the hordes of brain hungry zombies. Yeah, yeah, everybody is doing games with zombies, I know. Did I mention that the area you’re defending is your own yard and that you’re doing it with some capably destructive, and amusing, plant life? It all adds to this game’s allure and is only a part of what makes it unique.

You begin the game with a meager Peashooter, which will be the root, pardon the pun, of your defense as you start off. This plant… well, it shoots peas. At zombies. Make fun if you must but in the beginning, it’s this bad boy that keeps your brain in your head and the zombies off your lawn. As you progress through the levels, the “Bloom and Doom Seed Co.” provides you with a variety of plants, both defensive and offensive in nature. You could even say they were your “Shock and Lawn” weapon provider… Go ahead, I’ll let that one sink in for a while.

"Shock and Lawn"... Get it???

"Shock and Lawn"... Get it??? Never mind.

The resources you gather to grow your plants (sunlight, of course) can be obtained as it falls from the sky during the daylight levels but as night falls, you have to be sure to grow sunflowers or sun-shrooms (a night time version of the sunflower, try to keep up) to be sure to provide a steady supply of sun to fuel your plant growing needs. Due to the limited space on your lawn, you’ll often find yourself juggling between enough room for defenses and resource producing plants but that’s all part of the challenge.

You’ll defend the front lawn, the back lawn, and even your roof from the advancing horde in the adventure mode with each locale requiring a slightly different style of play. Your roof has to have planters for each plant you wish to grow which, strangely, consumes resources (read the description of the planter in the Almanac for a quick chuckle). And you’ll also defend the lawns through day and night cycles which will have you choosing between your day and night faring plants.

Shortly into your adventure, your virtual neighbor, “Crazy” Dave shows up to offer advice. Unfortunately, he’s crazy, willing to admit he’s crazy, and you have to wonder how much you can actually trust someone who wears a pot on his head. Fortunately, he proves to be much more useful as a merchant later on in the game.

Dave has...issues.

Dave has...issues.

Many players will find that the first playthough of the adventure mode serves mostly as a tutorial. It’s the repeated playthroughs, the minigames, the puzzle modes, and the survival modes where the main challenges, and the true value of the game, lie. Beating each of the additional modes results in additional challenges which further increase the replay value of the game.

The Busy Gamer will have to be careful of this game. It’s easy to lose track of time as you grow your garden of doom. Minutes can turn into hours if you’re not careful as you try to beat just one more level. Fortunately, the very useful, very easy save feature makes it a snap to pick up where you left off. Need to be somewhere? No problem. Exit to the main menu and your game is automatically saved. Even if you play a different mode, you can pick right back up where you left off on the adventure mode you were playing until two in the morning.

I imagine there will be many out there who end up missing out on this game because the premise doesn’t sound attractive to them. Their loss. Created with a clever wit, addictive gameplay, and an attractive price tag, Plants vs. Zombies is easily one of the best games I have had the pleasure of sitting down with in a very long time.

Gritskrieg – End of Line

Defense Grid: The Awakening

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

 

Defense Grid: The Awakening - Busy Gamer Rating 5

Defense Grid: The Awakening - Busy Gamer Rating 5

First Glance:
A mix of strategy and resource management with a dash of puzzle thrown in all wrapped up in a very good looking package.

The Short Story:
Hidden Path delivers on the promises they made at PAX. This game is addictive, fun, and easy on the eyes and ears. There’s very little here not to like. And the bonus for the Busy Gamer is that it won’t eat up your whole day.

The Score:
Having had the opportunity to sample Defense Grid: The Awakening at PAX, I was happy to see that not much about the game changed my initial impressions of it. DG:TA’s controls are easy to learn and easy to remember, long absences won’t mean having to learn everything from scratch, the graphics are very well done as is the sound. All of this and a nice low price tag ($14.99 via Steam at the moment) earns DG:TA a solid 5 on the Busy Gamer scale.
 
Body of review:
When someone mentions an RTS, you’ll more than likely hear me groan. It isn’t that I don’t like the RTS genre, just the opposite, I love it. But most of the time, an RTS has a steep learning curve and hefty time requirements to be able to succeed at, or even enjoy, it. Not so for Defense Grid: The Awakening. Hidden Path has managed to take the best parts of an RTS, mix in some puzzle aspects, and offer up a very decent title.

It’s a very simple concept. You build towers to defend your base from invading alien baddies. The towers are stationary so the twist is to try and funnel the baddies into your “killing path”. Essentially, the bad guys take the shortest clear path they can find to your energy cores (the source of your power, a factor in your resources and the bad guys’ goal) so building your towers to block access to certain points allows you to set their path. But block it to where they can’t reach it and they’ll walk right past your long line of towers to the shortest path they can find to reach the cores. Lose all of your cores and the level is over. So you want to make them hard to reach but not impossible otherwise all the hard work you’ve done setting up the perfect death maze will go to waste.

The towers are varied and have three different power levels that become accessible as you fight your way through the levels. Different towers are better in some situations than others. The Inferno tower, for instance, is great for setting fire to large groups of the smaller aliens where as it doesn’t do well in terms of range or against the bigger, tougher aliens. The Cannon tower hits much harder but can only fire on a single target at any time and the range doesn’t allow it to fire on targets that are too close. A mixture of the different towers is required and that’s where another aspect of strategy comes into play.

Resources are handled differently than other RTS games. You’ll begin a level with enough resources to build a small amount of towers at which point the only way to generate more income is for your towers to destroy some enemies. Once you’ve banked some resources, they will generate “interest” based on how many cores you have left. You’ll have to juggle between generating resources from the interest and building bigger, meaner towers to tear down the aliens more efficiently. No little miners running around in this game.

After beating a level, you have the option to move on to the next level or try again. Achieving higher scores on a level will unlock different “modes”. For instance, my score on one level unlocked a 10k resources mode where you have 10k to begin but don’t generate additional resources no matter what you do. It certainly generates a number of different ways for you to play, not to mention increasing the overall playability of the game.

While the levels can take a bit of experimenting to determine the best way to defend your base, you can spend as little as ten to fifteen minutes on a single level allowing the Busy Gamer to enjoy as short, or long, of a session as desired. And the online leader board keeps track of how well one is doing against the world at large assuring that you’ll always try just a little harder to get that high score.

This one scores high on the value charts, my friends. I would recommend picking it up if you haven’t already. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some Crashers to school before they make it to my cores.

 

Gritskrieg – End of Line










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