Developer McPepper Games has a single aim with their latest game Colony Defense. They wanted to streamline the tower defence genre so that only its minimal core mechanics remain. That means an incredibly basic look and feel and limited tools in at your fingertips to use. In some ways, it makes Colony Defense feel more like a logic puzzle than a TD game but its still an enjoyable experience to play.
Each level is a single screen, viewing a top down path for you to defend a core. As per most TD games, you need to kill the enemies going down the path towards you and survive the level over multiple waves of enemies. Once a level starts, it doesn’t stop but you can trigger waves early for bonus nanites – a currency you can use to trigger an emergency powerful nuke that hurts all enemies on the screen.
Your five towers are staples of the genre and can be placed anywhere on the map they can fit. A machine gun, a long range but narrow laser, a slow but wide ranged missile, a tiny radius but powerful razor and an area of effect slowing tower. That’s all you have and its all about the placement and eventual upgrades of these towers that matter most. Most levels wrap around in weird shapes so you’ll be working out what tower fits best where and doubling down on your tactics. All of this is easy to spot with crisp, neon graphics albeit in a very clean and minimal design.
Where Colony Defense excels is that upgrades increase the radius and power of each tower and aside from that, its about placement alone. You need to be decisive and quick and since your tools are limited, you know your focused choices will make or break a level. As the game progresses through 81 levels, enemies get more health, add on shields, spawn tiny versions of themselves, heal nearby enemies and get faster. This again means your actions will be key and in later levels you’ll be just making it over the line in closely fought battles with the final wave boss who’ll often wipe you out entirely with a single hit. Those nanites you collect by triggering waves early come in handy too as you unlock three emergency weapons to spend those on, causing a nice risk vs reward dilemma.
The downsides of this small scale approach is that what you are working with in level 1 is the same as level 81 and so the game feels quite samey during longer playing sessions. The audio is also quite muddy and uninspired, with a tonal clash coming from a genuinely bouncy voice over signally new waves or upgrades. In the end I muted both. The other obvious thing missing is that your towers always follow the enemy closest to the core you are defending. You can’t tell them to do anything else and this seems to be a specific game mechanic that enemies play into. It’ll send a tank enemy that sucks up all your firepower and then lots of tiny enemies will be protected. Again, tower placement is key.
Colony Defense does what it does very well but runs the risk of numbing players to well paced levels with its one note design. It isn’t quite in the top tier of tower defence games for me personally, but for its price point there is plenty to do and it offered a challenge. B-tier and worth your time if you are a fan of the genre.
Higher Plain Games is part of the Higher Plain Network. If you like what I do, please consider supporting me via Patreon for as little as $1/£1 a month. There are additional perks for supporting me, such as behind-the-scenes content and downloads. You can also share the website or use the affiliate buy now links on reviews. Buying credit from CD Keys using my affiliate link means I get a couple of pence per sale. All your support will enable me to produce better content, more often. Thank you.