Witch cards will drop: Space Run

Tower defense games are, on the most part, one of the few genres I feel is always reliable. TD games are almost always "good" if they look good but inversely almost never "great" no matter how great they look on the surface. A handful I've played have really impressed me, but usually by stepping a measure outside the genre, though that often enough doesn't work so well either. The best example of a completely in genre TD is probably Defense Grid, while the best one working outside the genre is probably Orcs Must Die 2. Both of those have sequels I'm not all that eager to play, which shows just how tenuous the process can be.

Space Run is, without a doubt, completely in the genre of being a TD game. Oh, it tries to step out a little. The game is about running cargo along a straight 'space lane' or whatever you want to call it, which is a very linear track. As you go, various obstacles and enemies arrive, hover around your ship for a little and then sometimes wander off, fight you, or whatever else. If they're asteroids, sometimes they run into you, which is hurtful.

Your main character is the handsome and handsomely named Buck Mann, an everyman space jockey who owes money to the space mafia (which unfortunately does not include references to Black Shadow or Blue Bacchus)  and works as a space runner. Your partner is the android Addam12, who has 12 written on his forehead and is drawn in a manner that reminds me a little of Kryten of Red Dwarf but isn't voiced in quite a charming way. He's a beep boop robot, etc.

Buck Mann accepts jobs from various wacky characters; well, the first company you work with isn't all that wacky, but everyone afterward is increasingly strange. Then you're off to drive a spaceship in a straight line through space and tower defense your way through what may come.

Roguelike fatigue: Dungeon of the Endless

The Endless line of products is sort of amusing to me in that it was the Steam Holiday Auctions that really shifted my focus onto them. I wanted to do one completed auction, just to get the achievement, but on the most part most games seemed like people were bidding on them with a day or two to "the sale" with an amount of gems worth more than their sale price.

I mean, just as an aside, but if you ever wanted to see that psychological issue f2p games exploit where the conversion of currency causes individuals to lose track of the value of a dollar, wow. Watching people spend $12 in gems on a game that is going to go on sale for $5 in less than 24 hours is impressive for seeing that particular mechanism in action. It wasn't like you couldn't just immediately sell the gems for $12, the market was the same number of mouse clicks away!

Anyway so the one game that did seem to be a reasonable price ... Wasn't this game. It was Endless Space: Emperor Edition, or Gold, or whatever which displayed the wrong item and with the DLC price included was a pretty reasonable amount. So I looked it up and realized they'd apparently made three games, sort of, in the shared universe. That's really cool, but apparently Dungeon and Space are the weaker titles to Legend...

But I ended up with this game, because it has some sort of weird arse coop set up and I think a friend bought it for me to play with them (I think?) while I got Space from the auction. I haven't even unpacked space yet, since its been wall to wall games this year, but I'll get around to it probably after I finish off Dungeon or more likely get sick of Dungeon.

Dungeon is especially interesting, though, because when you peel away the pixel graphics and the excellent audio you're left with the guts of several games connected to a roguelike skeleton. It is actually really weird, the game hybrids elements from tower defense to the point it almost feels like a Heroes of Might and Magic game, or a city builder, and there's some weird ideas I feel like came out of horror even.

If I was going to give it a genre, I'd peg it into "Roguelike flavored quasi-reverse tower defense" and then just keep talking because that tells you nothing...

Grinding on that tower like a pop music video: Prime World Defenders

I'm a big fan of Tower defense games as what I mentally refer to as "coffee games". Games you can pour your first copy of coffee and then play while you slowly savor your home-brewed, fresh ground steaming beverage. As such, this is going to slant this review in sort of a weird manner, because Prime World Defenders is a tower defense game that gained things by losing it.

PW:D is made by Nival Entertainment, who I don't know overly much about. I believe "Prime World" is a brand for their grouping of products, though I haven't looked into any of the other ones there's at least two more. Nival apparently did some of Heroes of Might and Magic V, which I found incredibly boring. I have something like a thousand hours logged in HoMM3 and quite a few in HoMM4 even, so I was rather surprised to find HoMM5 incredibly dull and not at all what I was looking for. I'm not going to hold it against Nival though, since I have no idea how much of it was their fault. Ubisoft continued to plow on, with the next developer further simplifying odd elements of the game and adding weeaboo shit. Do you really think people who have trouble with turn based strategy games have trouble with things like hexes and the fact there's multiple currencies? People don't have trouble figuring out how different monies work. We're capitalists. Money is 90% of what we do!

Anyway, as I said, Prime World: Defenders is a tower defense game, but with something of a twist that takes over a great deal of its gameplay and resources. That twist is free to play style grinding, though as far as I can tell there are no in application purchases in PW:D. Maybe f2p is the wrong description, but it feels like someone had some good ideas vis-a-vis f2p CCGs and then grafted those ideas onto a tower defense game.

It's sort of interesting because whether or not you like this game likely starts and finishes right from the question of whether or not you can appreciate a very upfront and obvious skinner box. Actually, to be frank, the game is probably a hybrid of the core gameplay of a tower defense with the addictive spicing of a Diablo game on top of it. Does that sound good?

Tower Defense Expertise: Defense Grid, the Awakening, the Oodles of DLC

Way way back I got talked into getting Steam at the beginning of the winter sale season. 2010, I think, the year I gave up the WoW and returned to the fold of the glorious PC gaming master race, gpu under one arm, keyboard the other, mouse dangling from my twitching hands. Glorious discount gaming master port gaming race. Blargh. The first game I got was gifted - Shatter, which is a nice little game - but the first one I really got into was Defense Grid. I think I paid 2.50 for it originally, with all the (then) DLC packed in and I've given them money twice more for DLC. Hilariously enough, this is the first tower defense game I'd ever played and probably the first time I'd really gotten into the genre. I think I'd played maybe ten minutes of it on a mod or something. I was never big into RTS games, and then I played WoW and Magic for a couple years, so I'd missed a fair bit of the middle years of gaming.

So Defense Grid was my introduction to tower defense. Since then I've played two of those Orcy games, Sol Survivor, Plants vs Zombies, Sanctum, Dungeon Defenders and perhaps some other shit I've forgotten about. Of all of those ... Defense Grid is the only truly pure TD game. Sol Survivor is close, as the interaction is limited, but the other ones all dumb down the TD mechanics in exchange for more action elements, for better (Orcs Must Die) or worse (Dungeon Defenders, ugh). Ironically, or not, there's a reverse bell curve in action; the more action game, the worse. Then the better!

Defense Grid is very, very pure TD. The tension doesn't come from running around or fighting Orcs, but in very carefully aligning the load balancing of the grid. Doing a fight well requires increasing amounts of precision, on two planes. First, when and where aliens die impacts your "recovery" rate, which is both in terms of interest, access to interest and a couple other little things. Second, the way your towers are structured - the build of the maze - relies on committing to the plan and guiding it as it goes. A couple towers spin into a maze, and then the maze's parts align together to do force multiplication until you have killzones that dispatch ten times the number of aliens the towers would if they weren't working in tandem. I'll talk about this again in a moment.

It's not a visually stunning game, though its art direction and conveyance is pretty solid. The locales are extremely varied, lending a ton more flavor to the game than it would possess otherwise. Maps include icy canyons, various high tech installations and the edges of future cities. The audio direction is really good. You're paired with an AI that ... Well, honestly isn't much more than a cheerleader, but he talks and rambles, gives some back story to aliens being pew pew'd by towers.

Play Relevant Month: Fatalism of the Orcs, Again?

Sequels, man, sequels. There's still orcs. And they still must die.

OMD2 catches up with its spiritual "competitors" Sanctum and Dungeon Defenders by adding two player coop, adding the oh so sexy sorceress from the first game as a coop partner. I put those two in quotes because OMD1 was fun, those other two, not really. I think coop is largely the biggest and most evident element added to the game, the engine looks slightly better, the music and sounds remain excellent. The art style is cartoonish and the whole game maintains the same irreverence the first one had. You'd notice immediately if you say down to play OMD2 that it wasn't OMD1, but maybe it would take a bit to discern between the two if you were watching a stream or so.

The other big changes to the game are more behind the scenes sort of stuff. There are new map types and new maps, but those sort of blur past you. The game has a much deeper pool of traps to choose from, with more weapons and the addition of a "trinket" item type that has various miscellaneous effects. The biggest change to those is a grindy system where you acquire "skulls" as you did in the first game to upgrade and modify your gear. The first game has one upgrade per trap, whereas this game has a chain of basic upgrades, then a binary selection.