Defend Your Life

 
Developer: Alda Games
Steam Release: April 2015
Hours Played: 18.8
Similar To: Alien Robot Monsters / Evil Defenders / Garden Rescue / Kingdom Rush
Rating: 3/5 Parsnips

  

GAMEPLAY
With the Steam store currently awash with cheap and dodgy tower defense games, it's easy to charge into the minefield and end up with a dud. Fortunately, Uncle Frankie has waded through his fair share and is able to inform you that if you're a discernible TD enthusiast you'll unlikely be disappointed with Defend Your Life. With hand-painted cartoon graphics to represent the inside of a body, your job is to build towers to stop nasty bacteria and infections from reaching their goal. Classic rules apply: creeps follow a set path, you place towers on build squares, you upgrade them when necessary, you use special abilities after cooldown, and generally attempt to 3-star levels after a bit of experimenting and trial and error. Tower-types number just four but like Alien Robot Monsters, feature an interesting tech-tree to keep things varied.  

BALANCE & PACE
Unlike inferior TD games whose flaws and cracks manifest after a few hours of play, DYL keeps things well-balanced and challenging. Depending on how well you stomp a level, rewards come in the form of 1-3 golden pills which you use to upgrade the usual suspects such as attack damage, abilities and starting oxygen. Before every battle, you'll elect to play on easy, medium or hard and are shown crucial info on such parameters as waves, speed and starting hit-points. Afterwards you could: try the same level on a harder difficulty; move onto the next one; try and crack an earlier one by using the newly earned pills and new-found strengths or reset your upgrade tree completely and try a new strategy. Oh, and after half a dozen levels or so you're introduced to the game's shop and a hero who helps you in battle!
 

PRESENTATION & DESIGN
One huge positive in favour of DYL, in addition to its engaging gameplay, is the smooth and crisp interface while exploring menus. Like Evil Defenders, the interface combined with the high quality art-style never makes tweaking upgrades or exploring under the hood a chore. Like it should, this makes the vital component of careful planning feel just as important as the battle itself. Again, drawing further parallels with Evil Defenders, the art-work here is so well-done that it successfully makes the gruesome subject matter of harmful viruses and oozing bacteria... fun! Another point is that like the child-friendly art-work of other TD games such as Bloons, Fieldrunners and Go Home Dinosaurs, the bright primary colours of DYL may well be made to appeal to kids, but that doesn't necessarily make it a kids' game. 

PROGRESS SYSTEM
Your progress is mapped out by a guy lying down on an operating table with his vital internal organs exposed. A path, starting from the mouth makes its way down to his legs and is interrupted by circles which represent levels. Curiously, the urinary bladder is placed slap bang in the middle of the penis - but we'll move on. A green circle means you've beaten the level on easy, blue on medium and red on hard. Furthermore, 1-3 stars adorn the circle to show how well you've beaten it. As a mobile port to PC, and much in the spirit of Kingdom Rush, diamonds can be farmed and spent in the shop on further boosts to turn the tide of battle. You'll find that earlier levels on hard and medium are impossible to crack early doors and can only be beaten once further upgrades are unlocked later in the campaign which works fine. There are 17 battles altogether.  

CONCLUSION

Do not be fooled by Defend Your Life's kid-friendly presentation and budget price tag. Although not hugely innovative, this is a deep and engaging tower defense game that gradually unravels its layers to you in both intriguing and entertaining ways. Thankfully, it is not burdened with the need to play optimally like so many lesser titles as the three difficulty settings are pitched at the right level to give the right depth and challenge. Going back to try out earlier levels on a higher difficulty with more powerful upgrades is an additional angle that works well  Also the towers themselves, although only four in number, give enough variety through their tech-trees to make experimentation both interesting and worthwhile.