'Desktop Tower Defense' simply mediocre

• By JOSHUA WASCOM
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: Jun 8, 2009

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“Desktop Tower Defense” for the DS is a simple game, based on an identically titled, freely available Flash game.

Wave after wave of little blobs try to cross your desktop. You build and upgrade towers of various types that fire on them as they move across in attempt to rid the board of them before any make it to the other side. The strategy and fun are found in choosing different placements for towers and in making mazes through careful tower layouts.

On a basic level, the game is fun. It’s simple and fast, but has enough variety from the user-generated nature of the level to keep repeated play-throughs interesting. A flawless victory in any particular game mode is generally enough to rob that mode of its appeal, but there are enough slightly different modes to keep the game fresh for a while. The addictiveness really kicks in when you can’t quite beat a particular mode and have to go back to the drawing board on the entire maze.

Unfortunately, the simplicity that works so brilliantly in the gameplay is a problem in the overall presentation. The game does do a passable job of discussing certain key strategies, but a few good tutorials would have gone a long way.

A lot of gameplay information that newcomers need is either locked away in page after page of text or absent entirely, and the interface outside of the game is unhelpful as well. Trial and error is an important part of “Desktop Tower Defense,” but it shouldn’t be the mechanism by which you navigate the game’s menus.

A much larger problem isn’t anything to do with the game itself. There are simply many better and longer-lasting versions of this game available. If you don’t need the DS’ portability, the original version of the game, available for free on the Internet, is clearer, plays more quickly and offers a wider variety of gameplay modes. On the DS itself, both “Lock’s Quest” and “Ninjatown DS” have more depth and variety of gameplay, though they do lose a bit of the simplicity.

“Desktop Tower Defense” for the DS isn’t exactly bad. For only 20 bucks, you get an addictive and engaging strategy game with differing gameplay modes that should give it quite a bit of replay value. It serves as a good introduction to the tower defense genre. If you’re already familiar with the genre, though, you may be disappointed at the step down that this game represents.