Game: Creature Defense
Publisher: Hudson
Platform: PSP
Price: $7.99
Pros: surprising depth of gameplay
Cons: music & graphics don’t stand out
What do you get when you combine the deck-stacking phenomenon of a card game like Magic: The Gathering and a tower defense game like Sentinel? Hudson’s new Creature Defense, that’s what. It’s on the PSP Store, and it’s strangely compelling.
The game starts off gently enough, with a pre-set deck of cards to begin your defense of all things holy. Wave after wave of somewhat more difficult beasts come a-wassailing down the path, trying to get to your main tower, or castle, or whatever, since it’s offscreen. Some of the beasts fly. There’s a card for that. Some of the beasts come in great rolling flocks. There’s a card for that. Some beasts are just plain buff and have lots of hit points. Yes, there’s a card for that. There are three cards from Sony’s Eye Of Judgement Series to unlock, as well as 60 other monsters for the fighting and the defending, oh, yes.
Players get options, oh indeed they do. Sound options consist of a slider that mixes the level of the background music against the level of the sound effects. Full left, it’s all euro-trash spank-me-I’m-in-a-discoteque background music and you can’t choose what you hear (this ain’t no iPhone, so quit askin’). Full right and you got just sound effects: bashing and gnashing and fighting, oh, my. The options screen also includes a toggle for battle effect animations, scrolling or cursor mode controls, as well as sensitivity options for your analog stick and directional buttons. Ladies, don’t you wish you had these for your man?
Gameplay is standard tower defense – keep the baddies from their march of progress. Each landscape has several phases and time trials to be unlocked. In each phase, wave after wave of baddies will walk, slither and fly by. Towers are built using the creatures in the five card deck, using a certain number of mana points to summon them to the playing field. Each baddie and creature has an elemental affinity assigned: fire, water, forest, or darkness. This affects the damage taken by the hordes of baddies as they progress. Choosing the correct set of cards is critical; even with level ups available, not having a crucial creature card can and will happen, usually after a good chunk of time has been invested in completing a full course of waves. It’s frustrating in a good way, and leads to a depth of gameplay that can be missing in typical tower defense games that rely on a preset number of tower types.
The music that plays, as mentioned above, is not horrible, but not something anyone would want to listen to outside of the game. The painterly landscapes and card drawings are serviceable, allowing players to discern which card is which, for example, on a tiny screen, but just that – serviceable. Nothing here jumps out, and that may be more of a function of the small screen. The images of the creatures below (created by “critically acclaimed” fantasy artists) look great on the computer screen, but not so amazing on the small PSP screen. Overall, though, the imagery works and the blandness – whether due to small screen or the artwork itself – does not detract from the game.
Overall, this game gives much more than eight dollars worth of enjoyment. On a purely economic level, it’s worth the price, and then some.
Popularity: unranked [?]
