Sunday, September 4, 2011

Defen-G Astro - 2.99 (Innodis)

Defen-G Astro is a new action defense game from Innodis in which you place characters alongside and on top of each other along the 2D levels to protect your tower from being attacked by wave after wave of enemies. The gameplay is simple enough, you select your character from the available characters at the bottom of the screen, and then place them anywhere where a shadow of the character appears on the battlefield. You can tap on the character to upgrade them, up to 3 times, or sell them for a fraction of what they cost, with each character, and upgrade, costing a certain amount of stars. Then you defend the tower behind you while wave after wave of enemies come at you, replacing characters, or units, if the enemies defeat them. It’s like a 2D version of Defense Of Fortune.

The controls are simple, and really, these types of games work extremely well on touch screen devices. Tap, tap, tap tap, tap. As you progress throughout the game, you’ll collect more units, and abilities which are stored on the top of the screen automatically, and can be used by tapping on them once they’re charged. There’s defensive abilities, kept on the top left of the screen, and also some magic spells, which are placed on the top right of the screen. These abilities range from Health and Shields to Extra Stars that when tapped on, spit stars out at you that you’ll need to tap on to collect. These charge during battle, as well as get quick recharges from enemies that drop refill orbs. The characters/units, are also picked up while you progress throughout the game. After starting with 2 units, you’ll eventually build up your units, and be able to select which ones you’ll want to use in each battle.
The graphics in Defen-G Astro are very nicely done, and very polished, with environments being vibrant, but easy to see the action played out against them. Animations are done extremely well, and look great. From the movement to the death animations, everything is done in a very professional manor. The level select screen is placed in space, where you’ll move from star to star going through constellations, finishing each of the levels, and completing the shape of each one. This is kind of strange, because the level select screen shows you battling on stars, but the backdrops for each level are usually snow-caped mountain tops, open fields, or volcano scorched landscapes that don’t really reflect you battling it out on a star. Then again, having a backdrop of space with a couple stars in it would get pretty boring very quickly.
To top it off, Defen-G Astro is GameCenter supported, giving us two leaderboards, one for the campaign mode, and being your total score built up throughout the game, and the other for your high Infinite Mode score. Infinite Mode being an endless battle that you play until your tower is destroyed. However, there are no achievements, so you achievement hunters out there are kind of out of luck. But with the addition of Infinite Mode, generally one of my favorite modes in these types of RTS/Defense games, and the ability to replay each of the levels with one of 3 difficulties, there’s an unlimited amount of replay value, limited only by your desire to play the game. Defen-G Astro is a very polished, very entertaining, and challenging action defense game, one that’s actually quickly becoming one of my favorite RTS games on my device. For $2.99, it’s got tons of content, and loads of gameplay, and is definitely a game that all fans of the genre should pick up.

Defen-G Astro is getting a score of 9 out of 10.





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