Sneaking onto Switch and PlayStation in 2024, Defense Master is a lane defence game that lets you take on the role of one of six protagonists of a caravan travelling across the land for survival. Along the way, you’ll have to deal with enemy encounters, surviving a time limit of increasingly buffed and angry beasts. Defense Master plays like a part shoot-em-up and part tower defence game and feels incredibly active. There is a lot to like here despite the ultimate experience being let down by some later game issues.
Each level is broken up into three areas. You, the player, defends the left-hand side of the screen and each enemy that gets passed you chips off your health. You’ll be defending from the main game area – a five-lane battlefield across the centre of the screen which enemies will charge down. They’ll switch lanes, fire projectiles at you, and generally cause a world of pain. You’ll be switching lanes to shoot back at them whilst avoiding their enemy fire, although some characters have an auto-aim feature which can be helpful early game. The third area of the screen is a plinth towards the top of the screen at the back of the stage. This has five display areas to place down up to five towers. These towers mostly attack enemies as they charge through their cross-section of the five lanes, which makes their positioning crucial to your strategy.
The turrets, their upgrades and your own character stats are all upgraded by getting XP from killing enemies. As you level up, you are given the choice of four upgrades at random to pick from and these upgrades almost always have four levels of power. For instance, the wind turret initially causes small damage and slows enemies down. Level it up to level 4 and suddenly a massive tornado is spiralling around causing much larger damage too. Interestingly, the upgrades are layered on top of each other, not replacements, and they do not have to be upgraded in a linear order either. That means if you get a rare high-level upgrade, it might be wise to jump for it when you see it even if it might not be your preferred option right now. Your character can improve their health, health regen, XP gain, damage and attack speed amongst many other traits during a level too. Adding on status ailments is quite potent in Defense Master too.
Levels run for a fixed time and you have to survive until the clock reaches zero to win. Enemies are randomly deployed to a degree based on themes so each playthrough is different but similar. What does switch up at random are the mini-bosses. These seemingly appear at any time and are selected at random, meaning that you can have a run end early because of some harsh RNG. This happened to me often in the later levels because a mini-boss would appear within the first two minutes of a level before I’d barely levelled up anything. Mini-bosses all have different attacks but they also spawn lots of cannon fodder to prevent you from hitting them. Take too long and the game resumes sending regular enemies at you alongside the mini-boss who will still hang around until they are dead, so it becomes a cumulative effect that often kills you off.
This is where the meta-progression comes in. Coins can be found during a run that unlocks the six main characters, but also a performance boost upgrade tree. Nothing unusual is here but these upgrades are crucial to survive Defense Master beyond level 4. The problem with the upgrade tree is that it maxes out early in the game, but the game itself continues and gets harder still. It felt like the late game was wildly lopsided because you cannot upgrade at pace with the game itself. It is at that point Defense Master shifts more to a bullet hell avoidance game in the hope you can upgrade in level enough to have a chance but it often felt like the mini-bosses would overpower you right at the end of each level. This is often down to the lack of warning for a specific attack, or some attacks hitting all the lanes anyway and you are meant to soak it up like a sponge. No amount of levelling up, combo chain effects, special ammo or magic from certain skills can keep you from getting overwhelmed, so sometimes it doesn’t feel fair.
The end game ended up becoming more of an annoyance than a challenge. I also found it curious that exactly where this crossover from lane defence to bullet hell shooter happens is exactly where the platinum trophy comes on the PS5 version. Maybe the developers knew the game balancing went awry here so they chose to cut the losses by giving not much incentive to continue afterwards. The other characters you unlock don’t really help the late game and are largely harder to manage than the base character with no benefit to being trickier either. As such, I recommend Defense Master for a breezy title and a fairly simple platinum trophy if you like an active, priority-shifting lane defence title. Just don’t expect too much help beyond the platinum to make it an enjoyable experience.
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