Defender's Quest

Really enjoyed the game. It is quite apparent that someone put lot of thought and effort into making the game. It is a blend of RPG (in that you have separate characters and skill tree for all of them) and tower defence (in that you summon your characters on map to stop waves of attacking creeps) and it blends superbly. And of course then there is the story. It is not very usual for TD games to actually have a story (yes, I can think of few, but it is often too shallow), but Defender's Quest lays out quite nice, epic and funny storytelling. Main characters have distinct personalities and comment on the plot often(actually most of the plot is made out of dialogues). There isn't much in the way of choice on how to make the story progress, but then again - having a good story on a TD game is good enough for me. As the graphic goes - It is quite nice pixel art with enough animations to both look alive and to let player distinguish between different attacks and abilities. Music is also nice. Not great but works with the rest of the game very smoothly. Finally there is negative comment (you do not have to read further if you do not care about security that much): For a game that is DRM-free it needs you to do quite lot of stuff you probably don't want to. Then again you can disable part of it without much effort. 1. It requires you to install Adobe Air. I personally don't like it and it can be seen as potential danger to your PC. There is nothing you can do though. DQ is an Air application. 2.At every start-up it tries to connect to its home website to download updates. You can still play even if it is unable to connect, but there is no option to turn this off. You can disable its internet access through firewall but that makes it one more thing to worry about when you actually want to update - why they don't have a way to opt out auto-updates is a mystery to me. 3.It automatically "tracks anonymous play stats". Which is nice for them, but I only found out there is a way to disable it in the options menu after I completed the game. So, yes, you can disable it, but it is on by default and if you didn't read through whole EULA there is a chance you don't even know about it. All in all it is a very nice game with cool story and great replayability. Only problems are those minor limitations in field of security. I give it 5/5 since I do not find them that problematic - but it would be very nice if creators of this gem thought of that not everyone thinks it is great to send their play data or to connect to internet every time they start an off-line game. One last sentence: Thanks for reading this far and please forgive me those grammatical mistakes I surely did in this review - English is not my native language.

One of the few games where after playing the demo, it was "Shut up and take my money" - and that was nine months ago, and since then it grew much better. The blend of genres is a very good idea in itself, but the real value lies in replay potential. First of all, after you beat the game, you can go through it again with all the enemies being stronger and having nasty surprises in store, which forces you to adopt your previously working strategies. And second, there's a lot of room of self-imposed challenges in how are you going to play the game, that again makes the gameplay completely different. Most character classes also come with a skill tree that allows them to be shaped to different tasks - and the individual maps are so varied that there is no dominant strategy that would work well in all levels. Throw in savegame import/export and modding support - and there is really no reason to delay the purchase at all.

Yes, it's a tower defense game, with level-up elements, but at least for me it's an oddly compelling game while the last 40 tower defense games I've poked my fingers at have all left me cold. The characters are varied, the dialog witty and quick, and the overall story leads you along effectively. You can play this game in a pattern which is very challenging, or you can turn down the difficulty if you just want to see what happens next. At lower difficulties it becomes more exciting to just pump up new abilities and see them in action. At high difficulty levels it can be an interesting puzzle to best use your specialized characters in an interlocking way to defeat harder challenges. The game is built in Flash/Air, which some may not appreciate, but it also means you can try the demo out right in your browser on the developer site. Go ahead, it won't cost you anything. You can even import your game from the web into the purchased copy.

Based on the demo (available here, or a more extended version available at kongregate), this game is a lot of fun, even if you're not a big fan of the Tower Defense genre. For some reason, adding RPG elements is just happy-making. Despite having already plowed hours into it, I'm still hesitant to buy DQ. I buy from gog in large part because I *don't* want to be automagically opted in to surreptitious software installs and data tracking. So in response to Level Up Labs post here, yes, there would be a demand for removing the need for Adobe Air, turning off phoning home by default, and turning off auto-update as well.