When it comes to tower defense games, the discerning consumer has a lot of options these days. Whether or not there are a lot of good options is the subject of debate. In choosing what tower defense games to play or avoid, gamers of refined taste often take into consideration such aspects as graphics, enemy types, map layouts, tower upgradability and whatever that certain special hook is that seems to be unique to each individual entry.
Some tower defense games attempt to lure players in by focusing on or attempting to excel in particular areas, while being guilty of neglecting other fundamentals. Games like Plants vs Zombies seem to get everything right by combining an interesting world with unique attackers and a deceptively simple element of strategy – all you have to do is stop the zombies from getting inside the house and eating your brains, by putting things in their way.
Defenders of Ardania is a tower defense game set in the fantasy world of the Majesty titles. The rich pedigree that Defenders of Ardania draws from is augmented by the hook of allowing players to field their own armies, sending waves of units to attack the opposing players’ castles while attempting to guard their own. But does Defenders’ offensive mechanic leave fundamental holes in its base?
While other tower defense games have dabbled in taking the offensive, it’s difficult to recall any that have achieved a great deal of success on that path, particularly because dividing the focus of the player between those opposing elements can easily lead to confusion. If there is any fundamental flaw to Defenders’ formula, it lies in the fact that not just your attention but your resources are divided between defending your castle and attacking your opponents.
Typically matches follow the script of establishing towers early on to gain particular footholds or strategic points on the map, whether those are places that extend your range or increase your resources. Defenders puts a unique restriction on players though in not allowing you to build more than four tiles away from any location you occupy. This means that if you don’t establish yourself and expand your borders out early on, your opponent will control the flow of traffic and resources by their strategically placed builds – once the bad guys have a foothold on a narrow corridor you will actually be restricted on where you can build, because the game prevents you from completely walling your castle in.
Once you’ve realized where your towers need to be, you’ll face the challenge of selecting one of eight different tower types. Normally when picking towers in this style of game, you make strategically informed decisions based on the types of enemies you are facing and the particular strengths and weaknesses of your towers. Here you can only field an average of about fifteen towers total on the map at any given time – it depends on the particular map, but the most you’ll ever have is twenty and the least you’ll have is eight. Considering the fact that walls as well as resource gathering statues count towards this limit, what options you are effectively left with is one or two of each type of tower to accommodate the fact that your enemies are going to throw every type of unit at you they possibly can. This leads to Defenders’ greatest sin, which is the fact that it is a tower defense game that ultimately does not involve defense (nor towers really, but we’ll get back to that later).
The largest problem with Defenders of Ardania is that, unlike any other actual tower defense game, you never really have the capability of defending yourself. In Defenders, defense is simply an illusion. Despite all your best efforts and planning, you must accept the inevitable fact that the armies of the enemy will waltz past your towers and cause damage to your castle. There simply are not enough tower slots or upgrades available to you to be able to prevent this. This leaves you forced to wage your own battle of attrition, while restoring your own castle’s health though the use of a spell. Then, while you wait for the healing spell’s cooldown, you send your own armies once more unto the breach.
Again, the notion of sending out armies to attack is a cool idea lifted from the RTS roots of Majesty. The thing is that deciding what units to send isn’t really a matter of strategy either. All you really need to do to be successful in the single player campaign is build up your own towers while waiting for the enemy to establish all twenty of his (enemies always have the advantage over you). Inevitably then, with awkward clicks of the center mouse button on all the enemy’s towers, you can see what unit type the computer has failed to defend against, then with no real sense of urgency you simply spam that unit type while healing yourself until your opponent is eventually dead.
The AI will never take action at any point to counteract any strategy you have developed. This may seem difficult to believe at first, but take the following true anecdote as an example: one particular mission in the campaign has you and a single opponent set on opposite sides of a map, with only two possible avenues of attack. If you build walls to block off one half of the map, and send units down the other to attack, the computer naturally dedicates all of its resources to defending that position. Then all you have to do to win is sell those two walls that formerly blocked the other path and funnel your units that way. The computer will not readjust, it will simply fail.
That might make the game sound like it’s too easy, but there could be nothing farther from the truth. Later on in the campaign you will also encounter a stage which forces you to essentially “defend” certain attacking units. But there is no actual way to accomplish this goal. The way that attacking units work is that they depart from your base and head straight for their target – whichever opponent’s base you have designated. Units that pass each other say their friendly hellos and do not engage, escort or otherwise interact with each other (unless you send one specific unit type which will, in passing, take one obligatory swing on the way to the opposing castle, in the fantasy equivalent of a poorly executed drive-by shooting).
Consequently, you’ll lose that mission a few times before realizing that the only feasible strategy is to kill your opponent as fast as possible before your partner AI sacrifices too many of its men in a hopeless assault. In a way, it is an all too fitting allegory for the way in which, having purchased the game, you must come to the realization that your only hope of minimizing your loss is to beat the game as quickly as possible, then move on. Alternatively, you could consider it a victory to have simply not purchased the game at all because your pretend castle survives one hundred percent of the shots you don’t allow your enemy to take.
Anyone looking for an actual tower defense game should be advised that despite the pictures on the box art clearly depicting towers, careful observers will note that said towers are not actually defending against anything. In fact, one of the fastest strategies to win in any stage is to completely ignore both towers and defending and simply spam groups of units to attack and quickly overwhelm the AI; the fact that there is an achievement for doing exactly that is laughable, but in the way where you are the only one laughing and it is proceeded by awkward silence.
The multiplayer aspects of the game do not suffer from the poor AI, low tower limitations or impossibility of forming an effective defense. Instead, by removing all of those aforementioned hindrances, the multiplayer aspect of the game suffers from being a horribly confusing mess of a train wreck. If you thought it was hard to see what was going on with your opponent’s thirty towers plus your twelve, imagine a free for all with eighty towers on the map. You then entirely lose any ability you have to control the flow of battle, as opponents are constantly destroying and rebuilding towers and walls to confuse your armies into running in circles while punching holes in your own walls and allowing their armies a straight march to your front door.
While the surface of the multiplayer actually seems fun, there’s too much of an opportunity to take advantage of the system and rush your opponent into an early grave. In the off chance that you’ve made some sort of gentleman’s agreement not to do the equivalent of a Zergling rush, you’ll find yourselves locked in a hopeless quagmire where victory comes not from a clever opponent but from your own real lack of interest in participating. Eventually one player or the other will simply grow tired of the game and stop trying, at which point the Zergling gloves come off.
There are a couple of things that could have saved this game, such as the ability to create more effective defenses in the single player campaign, or the auto-generation of waves of soldiers coming from your base without the need to micromanage. Even then, with so much going on at once Defenders of Ardania is extremely difficult to understand. Defenders of Ardania has neglected too many of the fundamentals of the genre and has instead created a game of useless towers and attacking, which is a genre that only has the potential to succeed in an assault on the wallets of the unwary.
Final Score: C-
Compared to:
Defense Grid: Defense Grid is much truer not only to the genre but to its own name (it actually features defending, and you place towers on a grid). Hands down one of the best recent entries in the genre, there’s a huge element of strategy involved in what towers go where, what enemy types are coming and it even features an interesting story as well. Plus there are checkpoints that let you jump backwards in the stage to modify strategy and it offers various challenges that really encourage you to achieve gold medals.
Setting up all your army men in the sandbox then using the garden hose to destroy their base: Not only does this have that awesome feeling of nostalgia, there are some clear cut rules on what can and can’t happen, even when you account for imaginary force fields. Also, although none of us could have predicted it at the time apparently that innocent childhood game was both educational and prophetic: It’s Global Warming and it’s coming right for us! Run for your lives! Now it’s over there!
