i recently finished playing defender’s quest, a very affordable tower defense/rpg indie game. it cost me slightly more than 5 bucks with its initial release. i played it from linux because like most indie games nowadays, DQ (defender’s quest) is cross platform. i’m not much of an expert when it comes to the tower defense genre…this is only my 3rd tower defense game i’ve played (played tons of rpgs however). i find the genre fairly addictive though… its main weakness being the repetitive nature of the gameplay. DQ has pretty good stylized graphics and nice music. the story is as good as it can be in this type of game. it’s not particularly easy to frame a story around constant battle sequences. also if you don’t care about the story at all you can skip the cutscenes. the concept and the game engine are great. i ended up having two main complaints…

1. since the game’s setting is a fantasy setting i was expecting tons of cool & different enemies. instead you get stuck with approx. 7 different enemy types. i know there’s constraints with trying to make the enemies go along with the story and such, but i’m pretty sure i saw some kind of snail creature…what’s that got to do with anything?? i just think there’s so much opportunity here for other enemies.

2. the game is fairly short. i think if someone wanted to they could easily finish it in one sitting. there is some replay value in being able to play the same levels again at a different skill level, but even that only goes so far. realistically though… this is an indie game with a small scope, so you can’t really expect a 60 hour adventure especially for $5-ish.

overall it’s a good game and it makes me more excited for the possibility of what could be. and by that i mean i’d love to see the concept & engine applied to different settings. there’s just so much potential here. if expansions or a sequel are released i’d definitely get them.

Comments are closed.