Reminiscent of Retro Space Shooters, Defentron rocks the 80’s aesthetic in this Tower Defence game with very simple but extremely appealing graphics and Banging Music with the main goal being defend the computer system from viruses that look to take control.
Intro
This game compared to other games similar in genre to this like Bloons TD is more fast-paced with its enemy types and will only teach you the game very briefly in its first few stages that showcase very minimalistic and simple levels to help get you on track.
However, after this, the game will up the difficulty very quickly in a short amount of time that might make the game feel unfair.
Defentron features 6 Turret’s, each being upgradable in terms of range, power and rate of fire, and 14 different enemy types, each being unique on their own.
There is really only a decently sized level select letting you move forward to new levels/worlds or replay old ones, each with its own colour and theme and if you can’t clear a level you are pretty much stuck with nothing else you can do but try and try again.
Level Design
There is really only a decently sized level select letting you move forward to new levels/worlds or replay old ones, each with its own colour and theme and if you can’t clear a level you are pretty much stuck with nothing else you can do but try and try again.
The Level’s are pretty much just one line of which the viruses will follow from start to finish and the goal is to just place down one of the 6 turrets you will unlock to try and prevent the viruses from reaching the end with some stages having more places to put down turrets and others having less but the general rule is always the same.
But with this simple level design, the main focus would be on the enemy types and a nifty little feature this game has called overload which lets you temporarily put a turret into some sort of overdrive state that’s different for every turret-like with the basic fast fire turret, it makes it shoot significantly faster, or with the Blast Turret that blows itself up to decimate enemies around it.
But be warned as after the effects of overload wear off, you will lose that turret but will be refunded some of the Currency you used to build it in the first place.
Graphics/Performance
Visually, the game is extremely retro with a sci-fi feel and almost everything has it’s own designated colour and that includes the turrets ranging from fast red turrets, slow purple turrets or yellow chain turrets to name a few. Although, despite the very simplistic graphics of the game, it suffers from some pretty severe slowdowns and frame rate issues which are noticeable right from the moment you unlock the Overload Function due to the number of particles that appear on the screen and it just gets worse the more enemies you unlock, namely the swarm type enemies which spawn dozens of really weak enemies.
Controls
In terms of the control’s, this game is best played In handheld mode where you can use the touchscreen on the switch as when playing in docked you are forced to use a cursor controlled by the left analogue stick even when navigating menus. Now, while playing the actual game, you will be able to toggle Fast Forward with the Y button and Pause with the X button, I’ve faced a certain bug multiple times throughout playing that makes pressing Y not toggle anything and I could only toggle fast forward by using either the cursor or pausing using X first, then pressing Y to toggle the game.
You also cannot control the camera to pan around the map which is why the auto camera pan option is on by default but can get a little bit frustrating to play with a controller but is completely fine with the touchscreen. If you choose to turn off auto camera pan, the UI that gives you information on turrets when building them or upgrading them will get cut off instead of being shown within the screen, so it’s best to just leave this option on by default.
Gameplay
Gameplay-wise, I found one thing that frustrated me the most and it’s due to how the levels are shown to the player, being top-down but slanted slightly but, the range of the turrets do not compensate for this slant, making the turrets able to shoot upwards a lot more than they can shoot downwards which isn’t a big issue for quite a few turrets, but is a big issue if you want to use a chain turret but can only put them above the path enemies go through due to their really small range and at times not shoot at enemies due to this.
There are also quite a few balancing issues I found while playing through the game which gets very apparent when swarms appear as when they do appear, it seems that they get thrown almost every wave in levels where you don’t get a lot of options for building turrets, leaving you overloading a lot of turrets to compensate and might end up without any currency to build any new ones. I’d like to note that upgrading doesn’t really affect the amount of currency you get refunded when overloading if at all.
While this does add a layer of strategy the player can act upon, due to the fast-paced nature of the game it ends up coming off as frustrating although rewarding when you do manage to overcome the challenge.
Extra’s
While this does add a layer of strategy the player can act upon, due to the fast-paced nature of the game it ends up coming off as frustrating although rewarding when you do manage to overcome the challenge.
Thanks to Zerouno Games for providing a review copy and I hope you guys will continue to improve upon the performance issues and level balancing on this neat little tower defence game!
