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Circuit Defenders : Mac
Rounding off the recent spate of tower defence game reviews comes Circuit Defenders. This little game is written by a small independent company and comes in an iPhone/iPod Touch variant if you are that way inclined. I got into the game one evening when I was searching for decent tower defence games to play on my Mac. I find that flash-based ones are too short or simply don’t have the depth and so I was pleased to find I could get a demo of this to actually install and run rather than play in a browser and it was addictive enough on the first sitting to mean I ran off and bought it - I was in a giving mood.
It’s a very different beast from Plants vs Zombies (which is the other installed-on-my-Mac tower defence game), showing just how varied the genre is. For a start, this is all mini 3D tanks driving around a circuit board, where that’s cute plant sprites and funny zombies, and secondly the whole way the system works is a different one. In Circuit Defenders, you place your units around the track and watch as they kill everything that passes, gaining you money which you use to buy more guns and things. It’s very fun, incredibly moreish and has a ‘create your own level’ feature which, while I can’t be bothered with it, means there are loads of user generated levels to go and get when you are bored with the bundled ones.
There’s plenty to keep you interested in terms of settings and features too; a good variety of guns which all have different uses, levels of difficulty which go from very simple to ‘crazy’, and cool specials which you can pick up by selecting a single gun and manually controlling it for a little while. All good stuff.
So where’s the bad points? Well, if you put a lot of guns on the screen it slows down… a lot. I don’t have the most powerful computer you can possibly buy, and it does take about 200 guns before I hit the slowdown, but it does occur and no amount of resolution altering or graphical setting changing can really fix it. The game reaches a state of perfect balance after a while, where you no longer need to do anything and it’ll look after itself (basically, that’s when a level is complete; the waves just keep on coming) but the problem is that if you want to get an internet-decent high score, you need to leave it clocking up points in this state for some time. Unfortunately, because of the slow down, you can’t leave it clocking up points at x6 speed (which you play the game in for the most part) because the sheer number of bullets and explosions forces the speed down to x1 or x2. I calculated that to get on the top of the high score charts, I’d have to be willing to let Circuit Defenders run in the background in such a state for literally days at a time, and I can’t be arsed. So, though I know I could have the world’s best high score, I simply don’t.
Which leads me onto my second point; I’ve completed the game. You shouldn’t be able to ‘complete’ a game with so many user generated levels and so on, but I worked out how to beat any level with only five things placed on the board. Now, don’t get me wrong, I was very very pleased when I did it, but once you know a technique like that, it’s hard not to keep using it and so now when I play it’s more a fun waste of time ending in the inevitable equilibrium state. A shame, as I did so love it when it was providing a challenge.
I’m hoping there’ll be more; that the guy who wrote it will go back and do a new version with more varied guns and up the computer’s offence a little bit so that the state of balance is that much harder to achieve, but from the look of his website when I last read it, he’s busy with other stuff and well, good luck to him. I’ve not tried the iPhone version, but maybe I should, just to see if I can use the same trick there.
But wait! Just after I wrote that, I went to the game to get screenshots and saw a ‘new version available - click here to get it’ sign! Seems there may be more life in it yet. Hurrah! Seems like there are a couple more game modes, and probably more besides, great!
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