Genre Saturation

The tower defense genre is one of the most widespread gaming genres. Entries exist on a variety of platforms ranging from videogame consoles to smart phones, from Facebook to casual gaming websites. They can exist as disposable freeware or as stylistic PC Game of the Year candidates, such as Pop Cap’s Plants vs. Zombies.

Colony Defense, Mana Bomb Game Studio’s inaugural title, is a tower defense game that tries to rise above the detritus of the genre with a $10 price point and an attempt at innovation: full 3-D planets to defend. Outside of this added dimension, Colony Defense should be familiar to anyone with tower defense experience.

Familiar Terrain

At the start of each map, you are tasked with using limited funds and an assortment of defense towers to defend a number of colonies against invading aliens. As aliens range in size and speed and even mode of transportation – some crawl along the ground while others fly – defense towers come in a few varieties. The Flame Thrower Tower is very effective against fast units and continues to damage invaders even when they’re out of range. Stasis Towers slow the enemy by 50% but do no damage. Air to Air Missile Towers, as implied by their name, defend against airborne but not ground targets.

Despite the game’s wide variety of weapons, you’ll find yourself sticking to the reliable and versatile Laser Towers which can attack both air and ground units. They are also very effective when fully upgraded – each invader you destroy nets you income, which you can then spend on more defense towers or upgrading existing towers to increase their range, damage, and rate of fire. But if you purchase too many towers of one type, the aliens will develop a resistance to that tower, like cockroaches to bug spray.

After defending each planet, you also receive one talent point, or two if you successfully defend without losing a single colonist. You can spend these talent points on permanently increasing tower attributes. You can even decrease the cost of building or upgrading a tower.

As in most tower-defense games, waves of oncoming enemies follow pre-determined paths toward the player's base, while the player constructs armed towers in an effort to defend against the mindless onslaught. In Colony Defense those paths meander around spherical planets. So, unlike most tower-defense games, that means you can only see half the play area at any given moment, and not everything in that hemisphere is clear, meaning that only a fraction of the total play area is visible. So, the tactical variation that the spheres make possible is more than offset by the massive irritation of only being able to see a fraction of the play area.

Wow. This is awesome. It starts out easy as pie, and to be honest I thought that I was just wasting my time on this one, but watch the vid, cos it gets soooo hard.

The upgrade system could be a little more generous, and the better weapons would be nice earlier, but that is just me being lazy. On balance this really was excellent. I liked the sound, graphics and atmosphere that work together to draw you into trying anything you can think of to save those luckless colonists.

If you want some alien zapping fun that will challenge your skill and cunning, then this is a must for your game list.

The 3D graphics are not that flashy but they get the job done. Some of the planets have weird textures and sometimes you can see where the textures begin and end. My only nitpick here is that you can obviously tell this game is an Xbox 360 port with the Xbox controller buttons showing up in the menu buttons.

There is no voice acting so you have to read some text before each level starts. The background music is decent and pleasant to listen to. The sound effects consist of weapons firing and alien ships blowing up.

I had no problems running this game on my system.  It’s a pretty straight forward Tower Defense game where you have to protect yourself from hordes of enemies.  There’s no multiplayer or varying difficulty levels.  With thirty-four planets to defend, you’ll get your $5 worth of game play.  If you like Tower Defense style games, I would check this one out if you don’t mind the language.

I've been playing colony defence for about a week now and I'm trying to find something positive to say but in the end its only good aspect is its 3D take on tower defence the game was made for the xbox and there it should of stayed.

the controls are a terrible mess to deal with and even thou I'm a tower defence fan the constant removing and replacing of towers as I'm attacked constantly from multiple angels on a 3D world where I have to move around the planet to see what's going on is just to much.

all in all id say to stay away from this game even as a hard core tower defence fan if your looking for tower defence but with a twist i recommend creeper world instead