Orcs Must Die! 2 as Mousetrap

I have a distinct childhood memory of the board game Mousetrap. I had a set that I inherited, like many of my youthful amusements, from my older sister. It was well-worn and woefully incomplete; many of the titular “trap” components

Cubemen mostly succeeds with new take on tower defense

Cubemen’s aggressively simple design combined with clever manipulations of traditional genre mechanics creates play that is fun, but slightly too long.

The game presents the player with three game types. Each revolves around a variety of three-dimensional levels, two or more spawn points, and the titular cubemen, voxel-style humanoids with access to a variety of weapons and color coding.

Units within the game are split between two classes. The first are your soldiers, units purchased with the game’s currency that fall into the standard Tower Defense types, including slowing units, morters, flamethrowers and the rest. The second type are spawned cubemen, who are created automatically by enemy spawn points in the Defense gametype and by both sides’ spawns in Skirmish and Mayhem modes.

Tower defense evolved: The White Laboratory

Tower defense has faced every possible slander you can imagine. It’s “casual” strategy, a rich game like Warcraft 3 boiled down into enemies attacking, you defending. The genre as a whole leans on its tropes harder than anything besides perhaps

Preview: Defender's Quest

So hard to know what to do with these indie games. Defender’s Quest is a tower defense/RPG hybrid we covered a couple months back, and it’s set to be released soon in the traditional “Indie Beta”, which means it’ll be

Review: Dungeon Defenders

Fate, cruel and twisted, conspired to prevent me from reviewing this game. I think it all started when I bought the game a scant twelve hours before we would get an official review copy like some sort of real video

Orcs Must Die Review

I have mixed feelings on the tower defense genre. Traditionally they take place from a perspective set way up in the sky with a path for mobs to travel, and the player can ring that path with towers of various

Defender's Quest Impressions and the Future of the Tower Defense

Let me tell you a story that’ll get around to Defender’s Quest. This is the only way to start without hyperbole. I’m writing this piece in a coffee shop in Amherst, Massachusetts. When it gets sufficiently late, I’ll head on

The Cold Season: Iron Grip: Warlord

The Cold Season is an exploration of independent video game Iron Grip: Warlord, a FPS/Tower Defense hybrid available via Steam et al. It’s quite good, and worth checking out, especially if you have friends to play it with. This is

Immortal Defense now 'pay what you want'

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUC6W9r-Bj8&hl=en_US&fs=1] When it comes to Tower Defense, there are three games in my mind: Defense Grid, Comet Crash, and Immortal Defense. The former is the best by the numbers approach to the genre. Comet Crash makes a lot of interesting

The Sunday Gaming Club: Doughnut!

Truly, doughnuts are the king of foods. No man shalt hate them, because there are multitudes of varieties. Delicious, delightful varieties. The doughnut is king. And queen. And jack, and ace. And the joker in the deck, if there is