BattleField
From Zanecorpwiki
Tower defense enthusiasts looking for something a little more hardcore that some will love despite it's serious flaws. There are enough problems to keep the more casual player from bothering. Even those that like the game can't help but be annoyed by the many failings and shortcomings. In all honesty, unless your a tower defense maven, wait for the update.
The Good
This game has some really cool features that I've been hunting for. It's extremely satisfying to see them in the wild even if I can't take any credit for them.
For myself, the best part of this game was seeing the implementation of an experience based upgrade system--an idea I'd touched on in my own ramblings of what I would like to see in a tower defense game. It really works well.
The other idea that I myself always wish a game had, but you never find, was the inclusion of simple wall towers. Surprising, but as far as I know, this is the only field based (non-path) tower defense game that includes a simple wall, and I love it.
Finally, the game uses a 'medal' system to upgrade the towers. As you play, you're randomly awarded medals which you can assign to a tower to increase certain stats, like range or reload time. This is similar to the 'modules' idea I'd put forward in my own description of my dream tower defense game.
A final neat idea is to have different terrain in the game. You can force enemies onto areas that slow their progress.
The Bad and The Ugly
If I hadn't been narcissisticly captured by the experience and medal systems, I don't know if I'd have played five minutes of this game. Some problems sare so frustrating as to almost be deal breakers.
First, the terrain is hard to deal with. You can't place towers on some squares, and it's not clear at first why. Planning how to construct your path can be very frustrating when you suddenly find that you can't place a tower on a certain spot.
The terrain, though, you figure out eventually (though on the swamp map, it's just plain hard to read even once you get the concept). What's even worse is there are some hidden placement rules that may be straight up bugs in the path finding routines. Sometimes you just can't place a tower in an terrain valid spot even if it still leaves the enemy a path to your goal. I have no idea why not. Unless you're only allowed to inconvenience the enemy just so much... which would itself be a ludicrous restriction.
The placement bugs are almost deadly problem one. The second near killer is the pause... it doesn't work. You can pause the game, but doing anything unpauses it. Given that this is a fast paced game, it forces you into an otherwise frantic build that--especially in the later stages--means that you end up dying simply because you can't click-click-click fast enough to re-route the enemy.
I suspect this is intentional--meant to create that hardcore feeling--but it's still a bad idea. Part of the problem is that it compounds other rough areas of the game play to turn what (I imagine) should be frantic fun into an exercise in frustration.
The second big interface problem--and this is a bug pure and simple--is the fact that when you place a tower, it's necessary to confirm placement. Nothing wrong with that (except it makes the fast building required by the lack of pause hard) except that the confirm button is rendered on the edge of the circle showing the attack zone for the tower. This means that under some circumstances, you can't place towers with large attack zones to close to the edge of the field because the confirm button renders off the screen!
A third huge problem is the medals management is difficult. This is another area where a working pause would help, but swapping medals or trying to find where you last had a key medal. It seems that part of reaching the more advanced stages would depend on good medal management, but unfortunately, the interface makes that nearly impossible. What's more, the stats suggest that some bonuses stack while others do not, and this is neither clear nor certain... is it a bug, and if so where? If intentional, it needs to be a lot more clear.
Now for a more minor problem: lack of any special towers. They're all just different kind of guns. Not a huge problem, but a little boring.
Finally, there's the problem with balance in later stages. The game starts off on a nice ramp up (on medium), but goes from interesting to overwhelming way to fast. I think there's probably some tricks that'll get me a bit further on in the game, but the fact that by around 60-70 seems to be my current kill zone on both 'easy' and 'medium' makes me think there's a fundamental balance problem. All in all, this is probably the worst problem with the game, but the others are so much more immediate it's just not the firsts one you notice.
Hopes and Dreams
Just fix the problems! This game is TA meets tower defense, and I love that idea. The interface problems and difficult to read terrain create an unnecessarily steep learning curve and constant frustration.
Second the difficulty ramp really needs to be fine tuned. I've got a lot of tower defense experience and I think I get this game (though maybe not--in which case, that's a problem with the game too), but I've never had a chance to develop more than a quarter of the field.
