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I can’t stop playing Desktop Tower Defense. The Godfather, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night are all gathering dust. Well, I’m not sure if an XBLA game can gather dust, but there must be some equivalent.
Desktop Tower Defense is one of those deceptively simple games. Creeps enter two sides of the board and march in a straight line to the opposite sides. Your job is to place towers in their way to attack and deter them. When you kill a creep you can buy more towers or upgrade the ones you have. If you survive forty-nine waves without letting twenty creeps get by, then you win.
But that ain’t happening without a plan.
This game takes casual gamers and turns them into armchair generals. Check the forums for schemes and theories and convoluted concepts: how the game works, the best way to place your towers, how tower AI works with creep AI and more. Hell, I showed this game to Tom and five minutes later he sends me this.
Okay, the basics. You have five tower types, ranging from a fairly standard pellet shooter to a tower which slows passing creeps with ice. All the towers can be upgraded so the pellet tower can become a sniper tower and the freezing tower gains blizzard strength. Combined with missile, anti-air, and a water-based tower, you have a wide range of defenses against the creeps—but the creeps themselves come in variety. Some creeps are resistant to ice, while others speed through the maze of defensive towers you’ve erected. And then there are bosses who muscle their way to the other side, shrugging off all but the most powerful attacks.
While the game is graphics-light, amusing sounds make up for it and—frankly—you’ll be too busy fighting off wave after wave of baddies to be a graphics whore. The clip below is a little more frantic than actual gameplay and adds a song, but it’s a good example of what to expect (and a nice strategy).
This is not the Periodic Table.Because you think you’re hardcore, you’ll probably skip the easy level (which is a bad idea). Go on try the normal and hard modes. Then check out the challenge levels before heading back to easy. Then, learn something about the game and post your score on normal or high difficulty. Want to see how well you do versus us? Type GameCouch in the Group Score field and compare your score and your mazes.