Star Defense

Any previews of Star Defense were kind of exciting, I'll admit. Once I bought and played it, I had underestimated the detail of the planetoids on which you wage war. The textures and creep models are pretty impressive and some of the level design has a very Super Mario Galaxy creativity to it. Everything runs smoothly, a nice spacey scene revolves around your planet (even though its the planet that revolves in space, but its all relative), and the presentation and interface is all very neatly packaged and professional. However, the nuance of three dimensions did not last.

Once the "new game smell" wore off, I realized that all that three dimensions were doing, was hiding the fact that this was just a plain ol' tower defense. All the maps are pre-pathed ones (ones in which there's a road that creeps follow), towers are the same ol' towers, and creeps are just... well... I'll get to creeps in a minute. Granted, it all looks nice for a smooth iPhone game, but somewhere along the way the mechanics get all jumbled. First, towers.

As far as tower defense games go, towers stay pretty true. There's your machine gun, missile, slow etc. And while Star Defense doesn't fix what's not broken, they don't venture from the original slew. This isn't a flaw, it'd just be nice to see some variety, especially when the last tower is just a souped up version of the first.

Because you're on a sphere (or cube) there's no grid system. Placing towers requires a certain meticulous nature of making the most of a planet. While that may be ok to require of the player, there's no real way of telling when you're making a bad placement decision. It's not even that apparent to experienced players. This can get frustrating fast. On to creeps.

Creeps are... creepy looking. And that works. Each creep has a certain attribute as always (except for that first nooblet creep out the gate that doesn't pull any fast ones on you) whether it be speedy and weak, or slow and sturdy. And then there's the resistances, which should really be called immunities. This causes the player to always keep a variety of towers on his/her planet. If you go all flamethrower and they send you fire immune baddies, game over. However, we run in to balancing issues pretty quickly. While the last tower available is the strongest, and wipes the floor with most creeps, those that are immune to it will likely be the ones that slip past you. And since there's a tower cap, you have to decide how to pepper your planet efficiently. It gets a little annoying.

User interface, I'll touch briefly upon, is fine. One problem though. Unlike Fieldrunners, where you view a radial menu expanding from the tower you've selected, you get a box menu that always appears in the same place. This would be fine if your planet is always in the same place... but it's not. I've often sold a tower on accident just because my tower was right where the sell button appeared when I tapped it. Frustrating as all get out.

Overall, the game is repetitious. All planets are prepathed, there's just an aesthetic variance from one to another. There are added achievements but they aren't very special or hard to achieve, they just urge you to play the game for hours on end. Star Defense is like Pepsi; new look, same taste (whether that be sour or not). Ngmoco has done better.