Friday, March 27, 2009

Crystal Defenders

Review of new TD game Crystal Defenders.

Available Platforms: Iphone Touch, Xbox 360 Live Arcade, Wii Ware, Playstation Online. Yes I know... no web version. booo They should at least made a download trial version for all of us PC gamers.

What is Crystal Defenders? Final Fantasy meets Tower Defense!
I may be biased in this review as I'm a HUGE final fantasy fan... and I think you can figure out how much of a fan I am of Tower Defense Games. So you can imagine I had high expectations... although my joy of the simple existence of this game likely balanced things out.

I started by playing the demo on Xbox 360's Live Arcade. The demo consists of 1 map in World 1. (Full version has 3 Worlds with 4 maps in each) And after easily beating the 50 levels it threw at me, I went ahead and purchased the full version.

Here are some screen shots of Crystal Defenders.















First thing I noticed after purchasing the game is damn the difficulty shoots up quickly. I can see a lot of new/rookie TD gamers giving up on the very next map they throw at you. But after losing and repeating a few times you come to learn your towers(in this game your characters) abilities and taking advantage of special characters like the Thief who doubles your cash earned when near a defeated enemy.

After completing World 1, I went on to W.2 that gives you the use of Crystals which can increase a characters damage, speed, or range. This makes things interesting as you now have to take a different strategy of using less towers/characters but powering them up as much as you can. At least that's what worked for me.

I'm now at the 4th stage of W.2 and its mega tough with walls that block your towers/characters missile(archer/magic) attacks. Hopefully I will solve the last map on W.2 and move onto W.3 which is described as "Advanced maps difficult for even the most experienced players" (I'm messing up, but something along those lines lol)

Visuals are really cool, with a multitude of unique characters, enemies, and even a few Summons with animation. Though it could have been higher res. especially on an HD big screen where some enemies look they they were scaled up.

The music and SFX are decent but can get annoying when your replaying a difficult map for the Nth time. I've been turning it down while I play.

Overall great game. Highly recommended
9/10 TowerOfDefense Stars

Still loving TD Games

Wow its been a long time since I've made a new post.

My full time job of running Gold Sun Games has been taking up most of my time in the past few months. And I'm glad to report things are going well on that front, with a sequel to our first successful game Megaplex Madness coming out soon.

But don't worry I haven't lost my passion of Tower Defense Games. I'm still updating the Tower of Defense site with 1 or 2 new games every 2 weeks. That depends a lot on how many TD games have been released during that time. As I've noticed the number of new TD games coming out has been slowing down recently. But I'll still do my best to sift through the "inter-web" looking for free addictive little castle defense/escape the path games for your benefit. :)