Developer: 3 Sprockets Pty Ltd
Category: Tower Defense
Released: Apr 2013
Usual Price: £5.99
Hours Played: 4
Controller Compatible: No
Rating: 0 Stars
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Similar to Alien Hallway, this tower defense game has you churning out units from a base but that's where the similarity with that game ends. For a start it's in 3D and you send your soldiers to a particular location where they pummel the creeps in an effort to prevent them reaching said base. Like the game Edge, maps are cubed by design and set up as if made out of Lego.
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Menus, Progress & Stats
To a catchy marching tune, Cubemen 2's title-page comes with excellent pathways that lead to substantial and useful menus that are sleak by design. There is an area devoted to "Scores & Stats" that gives you a list of your scores in each mode with an online rank for each and a "Settings" menu that is very slick and neatly laid out. Hitting "Play" takes you to the level select-screen which has a string of 20 levels to play and two campaigns of 15 levels each. Underneath this line of levels you may add many more from the huge amount of maps generated by the community. In all, the developers have put a lot of effort in making sure the menus cover pretty much everything you'd want or need.
On top of this, there is massive customisation options for all manner of things from the different skins you can use, the many themes for the units and loads of different ways to play the game. After selecting a level, you are given the choice of 5 different game types or modes. (I'll be focusing just on Defense mode.) Then, you get to go with: novice, pro or elite difficulty; how many waves you want; number of enemies to defend against; a further set of four rules, and the amount of starting lives you want. You may even randomise the location of the bases! Needless to say, you get all the stats you want after completing a level along with an award based on how well you did. Suffice to say, 3 Sprocket Pty Ltd have everything ridiculously well covered.
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Gameplay
You play the game as the blue army and are first presented with the map made out of cubes. Creeps immediately start marching to your base from their own tower(s). On the left are the units you may choose from, each having different ways to attack. Click on these and then place them on the location on the map to direct that unit where to go. You may move these units around whenever you want. You get points to spend by killing the creeps. From here on in (for defense mode) it's the usual classic tower defense formula. Buy more units, place them in the most efficient place, upgrade when necessary and prevent the creeps from infiltrating your base.
The wave count is shown in the top-right corner and power-ups drop from time to time which you collect with your units. The gameplay itself is quite standard. You figure out a plan of where to place the units and churn them out accordingly. However, I did find that spamming the lowest tiered unit (the Grill) and placing them in a massive huddle did the job efficiently every time and on whichever map. They simply showered the enemy in a hail of bullets as they entered the choke points. As such, I found the gameplay to be quite mechanical and formulaic. Secondly, although I didn't use a vast array of units, they did seem to be quite similar in design and hard to distinguish from each other. Overall the game is very well-done but just not different enough.
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Conclusion
Cubemen 2 is a good tower defense game, don't get me wrong. The design of the menus and the huge amount of different stats you are given ticks all the boxes that a tower defense game needs to meet. The map designs are also very good but I'm still wondering if the really good campaign maps can be played individually. Zooming in and out and rotating around the cuboid levels is also nicely done.
Yet nowadays, in order for a decent tower defense game to be a contender it not only needs to be solid and well-designed (as Cubemen 2 undoubtedly is) but the gameplay really needs to have a unique quality that immerses the player and really gets them hooked (which Cubemen 2 unfortunately doesn't). The sound is all right - it has a pretty catchy soundtrack - but I really do wonder if they couldn't have tried to spruce both sound-effects and the graphics up a bit.
The firing of missiles is hardly perceptible at all and the explosions, being a little fountain of blurry pixels, are always the same. Units are also far too similar to each other with little to distinguish between them. A little tweaking in this department would surely have given the game a little more oomph, not to say a little more character.
Finally, spamming the same lowest tiered unit and placing them in a big bunch so they decimate the enemy at choke points may be satisfying for a short while but is not really what a quality tower defense game is all about. Sure, I may be mistaken and there may be more depth at some of the pro and elite levels on later maps but, for me, this seems to be the only tactic I need and this ain't good.
I will revisit the game and see if other tactics work better or are indeed needed at different stages of the game but until then for all the negative reasons above, Cubemen 2 remains at the red-star level.
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