iPhone App Reviews

 

The genre known as ‘tower defense’ has been enjoying great success on the iPhone.  Just have a look at Mote-M, Tap Defense, 7 Cities TD, The Creeps or the absolutely essential Fieldrunners if you need proof.   For the unfamiliar, classic TD gameplay in a nutshell starts with a static playing field and a pathway.  Enemies enter the screen at a set point, follow the path and try to exit.  Some variations let the player create this path with the defenses themselves, add multiple pathways and spawn points and so on.  So then, if enough of them exit, you lose.  Since you don’t want that, your job is to strategically place defenses to prevent the bad guys from exiting.  The addictive hook comes from trying to find that perfect strategy that gets you into a position of supreme power where you can cruise into the deeper levels of the game and onward to ultimate victory.  Where the various TD games differentiate themselves is in the production values, themes and how wildly creative they can make the defenses.  The latest entry into this category is Antivirus from Dead Rat Games.

 

Antivirus (AV hereafter) wraps this core gameplay around a cyber-attack theme where you have to protect your CPU from miscreants like malware, spyware and ‘phish’ (10 total enemy types).  The game’s currency is units of battery power and this allows you to ‘purchase’ the various defenses.  AV introduces a play mechanic I’ve not yet seen where the invading enemies can actually attack, disable and even destroy your defenses.  The game begins with a simple map and 1 pathway (2 other maps are available on the harder difficulty settings).  Baddies enter at the top and try to exit at the bottom.  As long as you have units of battery power you will survive but each enemy that exits slurps 1 battery unit and once you hit zero the next exit is your last.  You only generate 1 new battery unit per wave so you have to be very frugal until you can build up a supply of backup batteries which boost your unit production by 1 apiece (every 5th turn).  Defenses at your disposal are the familiar gamut of lasers, rockets and long-range snipers (10 defenses total).  Another cool feature is 2 defense types can be placed directly in the path of enemies to slow them down or cause damage.  All defenses have computer-jargon names in keeping with the theme of cyberspace attacks and all are upgradeable in key stats like damage, range and fire rate.  Another thoughtful feature is the ability to tell certain defenses to target the lead or nearest enemy.  The game’s UI is easy to navigate and works quite well.

 

Before moving to gripes and suggestions, it’s important to note this is the 1.0 release of a game from a small indie developer so some slack is in order if it’s a little rough around the edges (which I’ve tried to do through numerous rewrites of this review) while remaining as objective as possible.  I emailed most of the stuff below to the dev and he was very cool and responsive to everything and expects to have fixes and new features in the 1.1 release due very soon.  So without further adieu…

 

A personal gripe is the enemies often look more biological than cyber to the point where if the game told me to ’keep the nasty virus cells from invading the patient’s lung’ I’d probably have bought the story.  I guess what I’m saying is I’d like to see the cyberattack theme fleshed out in more detail overall.  The sound fx are decent and gfx crisp (though bland for the defenses) but there is no animation.  I don’t need a Pixar render farm mind you but I’d like to at least see enemies (the ones that have a discernible front anyway) rotate to point in the cardinal direction they’re moving.  Second gripe is the ingame documentation is inadequate as you’re given no info on how any of the defenses work and only the briefest overview of everything else.  There is an ingame help system in the form of popups (which can be disabled) at the beginning of each wave but the irony here is the only way to get to successive levels to see this info is to understand how to play the game in the first place.  The DRG website does have a tips page describing what the defenses do but even this is a bit lacking.  It still took a good bit of trial and error to figure stuff out (especially how the whole battery thing works).  The upside here is the dev informed me that a 2nd page of instructions will be added soon.  Also in the review version you can’t save your game and if a call comes in the app resets.  Further, there’s no onscreen indication of the ugpraded status of your defenses nor a graphic change.  On a lesser note, the game didn’t crash though graphic anomalies flashed very briefly and infrequently; nothing game-impacting though. 

 

The release version has a few bugs (or semi-bugs):

The DRG website mentions the main features of the coming 1.1 release:

So what we have here is a very playable tower defense game with a good twist and comfortable interface that captures the spirit of TD and is fun and addictive, all at a good price.  Interestingly though, the DRG website states they intend to raise the price after an introductory period.  Based on what’s planned in the next release, v1.1 will go a long way toward adding value to this game but if the price indeed rises out of the impulse buy range, it would be great to see a lite version so people can try it out first.

   

Version reviewed – 1.0

Global scoreboard – no

iTunes music supported – no

Lite version available – no

 

*****************************

Update 3/23/2009 – Since this review came out the developer has stayed true to their word and released 1.1 and just today 1.2.  I feel an update is warranted as a vast amount of polish and content has been added to this game and the price has so far remained the same, keeping it very competitive in the app store.  Folks this is no Fieldrunners/Sentinel/7 Cities TD but it’s absolutely worth a look for what is now a very solid, polished, full-featured tower defense game.  Very notably still missing however is save/resume (though incoming calls are now handled properly) so that stands out as a major feature that needs to happen before you’d call this game done.

 

 Here’s the list of updates in 1.1:

Here’s the goods in 1.2:

  *****************************