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Review: Master of Defense June 28, 2006

Posted by Jesse in : Game Reviews , trackback

Game: Master of Defense
Developer: Voodoo Dimention
Version: This is a review of the full version of the game.

Master of Defense is a pretty simple game. On one end of the map is a town, full of vulnerable peasants counting on you for protection. On the other end is an entrance from which wave after wave of monsters will come. Between these two points lies the road the monsters will follow to reach the town. You must stop them.

When the game starts, your defensive arsenel is pretty limited. You can build towers that can only attack monsters that walk on the ground, magic towers that can only attack flying monsters, and plant towers that can attack both, but do far less damage. Once you complete the first level, you gain the ability to spend experience points to upgrade your towers, or to gain access to two new towers. Freeze towers will slow a monster down, and with a few upgrades can easily hold a monster still while your other towers do some real damage. Fire towers aren’t really towers so much as big fires that you can put on the road. Any monsters that walk through the flames catch on fire and will burn for a short duration. Another upgrade gives poison damage to plant towers, which is pretty nice. Between the poison and fire, you can do a large amount of damage over time with just a couple of towers.

What I liked:
I really enjoyed this game. I’ve now played through all of the levels without losing a single peasant, and even managed to make it into the top 20 of the online high scores. (I’m currently in 18th place.) I love games where I can play again and again and get a totally different experience by choosing a different upgrade path. The environments and towers are really nice looking, and I really like way the towers animate as you upgrade them.

What I disliked:
There were only a few things I didn’t care for. At the start of each wave of monsters, there’s a very strange growling moaning sound. It’s somewhat unpleasant. After playing for awhile, it was starting to bother people around me, and I had to turn down the volume. I also didn’t like that there is only one save file. I couldn’t find an easy way (short of copying files around, which I didn’t try) to keep multiple saves so I could go back and try out new things on different levels. Finally, once I got the hang of things I spent most of the time playing at the highest speed, which made the game feel short. A few more levels would definitely have been welcome.

Games it reminded me of:
The game feels like playing a real time strategy game if all you could build were towers. So it reminded me of Starcraft or Warcraft 3. I guess this makes sense, as the game was inspired by a Warcraft 3 game type called Tower Defense, from what I understand.

Recommendations:
I’m glad I bought it, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys the base building portions of real time strategy games. I’m personally hoping for a sequel or expansion pack of some sort.

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