Mikado Defenders: an original feudal Japanese defense simulation for the iPhone / iPod touch!

In Mikado Defenders, players deploy samurai foot soldiers, archers, and other units, desperately attempting to defend their fortress from an all-out demonic attack. It’s tower defense, with a uniquely Japanese twist!

Set in the Sengoku Era—a time when Japan was torn asunder by civil war— Mikado Defenders features historical locations such as Edo and Osaka, renowned samurai commanders including Uesugi Kenshin and the “One-Eyed Dragon” Masamune, powerful Guardian Spirit allies, giant demonic enemies, an in-depth castle improvement system and more!

Special Characteristics:
- Castle Improvement – Build your base up from a humble campsite to an impregnable fortress, complete with barricades and turrets! Investing in your castle is vital if you’re to have any hope fending off the Skull Wheel and other massive demons!
- Guardian Spirits – Hold off the attacking demons for long enough and your castle will attract the aid of mystical allies. A single attack from one of these Guardian Spirits boasts the power to turn the tide of battle! Guardian Spirits also improve with your fortress; the stouter your defenses, the more powerful your ally!
- Samurai Commanders – Reinforcing your castle and successfully destroying a “boss” giant demon has the chance of drawing a new samurai commander to your side! Recruit Oda Nobunaga, Sanada Yukimura, Date Masamune, and more! Each commander has their own special characteristics, and these abilities will prove vital in staging a successful defense!

Other Features:
- Simple yet strategic game play!
- Intuitive goals: place your troops on the map, fend off attacking demons, and guard your castle!
- Easy controls: deploy samurai, select commanders, and unleash powerful guardian spirit attacks through intuitive taps and flicks!
- Play on your terms: you can suspend games mid-level, and come back to them later, picking up right where you left off!
- Selectable music: enjoy the provided ZUNTATA soundtrack or listen your own tunes via iPod Library Support!

Check out the screenshots:

The Game

The Vortex tower can blow up to kill almost everything with its Rainbow of Doom.

geoDefense is another tower defense game for the iPhone and iPod. By now, most people are aware of the concept behind tower defence, but just in case: You build towers to kill enemies, known as creeps, before they get to the end point. There are two different types of tower defense games: the ones that let you block creeps and create paths for them to navigate, and those that have pre-designed paths for the creeps. geoDefense falls in the latter category. The gameplay of geoDefense consists of you placing and upgrading towers. It controls well, but in reality it is hard to screw gameplay that simple up. Each of the stages consists of a different path that is diverse enough to not feel like it was copied and pasted with a little change.

Though the game may seem simple and easy, geoDefense requires much strategy to win. Placement is key in the game. For each tower you want maximum exposure to the creeps. Sometimes this means putting a laser tower at the end of a lane or a blaster tower as close to as many lanes as possible. After getting a good placement strategy down, you need to get a good balance of upgrading towers and buying new ones. It doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but each level will, most of the time, challenge you to learn how to beat it. Unfortunately, this results in a focus on trial and error gameplay. This can be overlooked, but in geoDefense, it takes away from the gameplay experience.

Graphics

The graphics in geoDefense feel like they are pulled straight from Geometry Wars. Everything from the grid background to the different types of creeps. When the creeps die, they explode into a brilliant firework display full of colors. This is a good trade off from the simple puff of smoke, or nothing at all, that other games use. Though the graphics are simplistic, they are very well done.

Sound

geoDefense does not have too much sound diversity in the game. There is the basic menu sounds, the various shooting sounds, the creep death sound, and the countdown sounds. The sound isn’t bad, but like the graphics, they are very simplistic. The nice part is that you can listen to you songs while you play the game, and you do not have to worry about the soundtrack going while you do so.

Failure IS an option in geoDefense.

Additional Comments

Chances are that if you are a tower defense fan, you have played this game before. For the newcomers to this genre, it is easy to recommend this as an entry level game to play. It isn’t perfect, but it will give a better idea for what good tower defense games are than most that are out on the iPhone and iPod.

Conclusion

geoDefense is the best fixed course tower defense game I have played for the iPhone so far. This being said, its competition does not give much of a fight. [Editor's Note: Star Defense could give it a run for its money.] Sometimes the game gets old, but it is a very good tower defense game nonetheless. This game should be on your Application list, if not on your device, if you are a fan of TD or strategy games.

The Game

You call that an invasion?

The universe is in deep doggy doo – the S’Rath, an evil alien race, is invading planets and wiping out all of the inhabitants. You, the trusty strategist of these gaggle of planets, are given the task of protecting the fleeing inhabitants from being completely wiped out by these S’Rath jerks through the creation of defensive structures that will stop them dead in their tracks. Are you scared yet? Don’t be, because Star Defense is genuinely one of the best tower defense games I have ever played, let alone on the iPhone, and it is so well polished that I could literally see my reflection in the very well detailed models of the game.

In essence, you have four towers at your disposal: machine gun, flamethrower, slow, and lightning. The machine gun has a high rate of fire, but will only deal damage to a single individual enemy. Flamethrowers cause damage over time, slow will slow down your enemies, and lightning causes high damage over an area. There is of course a tower limit depending on the level and difficulty, and they must be spaced out appropriately. These towers can be upgraded to Level 3 towers where they increase in power and range for every level gained, but they are all rather pricey.

Oh… that’s a little better I guess…

As for the game itself, you are going from planet to planet helping the survivors fend off the onrush of S’Rath invaders and each planet increases the number of incoming waves of enemies. By my count, there are at least eight different kinds of S’Rath invaders, ranging from non-factor Probes to slow-resistant Man-O-Wars who will breeze past your machine guns. Once you complete the mission at a specific planet, you can also continue on for Endless mode where you survive as long as possible as the enemies continue to become stronger and stronger.

Star Defense also implements the Plus+ network, the social gaming platform from ngmoco:) that allows you to chat with other players on the network, try to get a score onto the leaderboards, or tackle one of the many achievements available to Star Defense players. This was my first experience with the Plus+ network, and I have to say I was mighty impressed and I look forward to future interactions with it. One of the fun little features that I found was that Star Defense had many challenges available to the user and you could send that challenge to one of your other Plus+ friends, which they could beat for bragging rights.

Graphics

Star Defense has gorgeous graphics – entirely 3D with very detailed sprites that are smoothly animated. In addition, the planets you will be playing on are lush and full of little intricate details that add to the environment. If you are anything like me, you will spend a lot of time rotating and zooming into the planet just to check out all of the different details while checking out the paths that the enemy combatants will be traveling on.

Sound

Welp, I failed.

Star Defense has a great futuristic-style soundtrack in the menu that definitely made you want to kick some alien butt, but once you enter the game, you are given a musical score that is very fitting for the planet. For example, the nature-like planet had a very serene and calm soundtrack with mostly piano, and the ice planet had a very cold and distant feeling soundtrack. Otherwise, the only music you will be hearing is the sounds of your enemies being obliterated – and is it an ever sweet sound.

Conclusion

Star Defense is one of those fantastic games that you definitely will have to buy, a tower defense game that is just so polished, so detailed, and so fun that you will will spend hours battling back hordes of S’Rath invaders just to save the universe. So what are you waiting for, a cape?

The Game

Rounds can get pretty hectic.

Fieldrunners is a tower defense game. This style of gameplay hearkens back to the Warcraft 3 Custom Maps community before the now-ubiquitous Defense of the Ancients began to make the rounds, and so some players may feel a twinge of nostalgia for the first app from Subatomic Studios. For those not versed in tower defense, or TD as veteran WC3 players have affectionately dubbed it, the objective of the game is to simply defend your base. Instead of shooting at them as a single unit or commanding groups of units to attack enemies, all you are permitted to do in tower defense is to build a variety of stationary towers that react to enemy units in particular ways. Most tower defense games have a diverse set of towers to pick from and an equally varied range of enemies, and the strategy usually lies in building the right towers in the right areas to stop wave after wave of man, robot, or vehicle from destroying your base, which normally sits at the opposite end of the map from the enemies’ spawn point. There may be single or multiple spawn points depending on which of the three maps you are playing.

The main tenets of tower defense are upheld quite well by Fieldrunners. In “Classic” mode, you are able to pick from four towers that fulfill various roles; for example, one tower slows enemies down, and another fires missiles that deal splash damage. Still more kinds of towers are available in the “Extended” and “Endless” modes, the latter of which removes the cap of 100 enemy waves. Each kind of tower costs a different amount of money, and you can build a tower anywhere on the rectangular map, so players will spend a lot of time and lose a few rounds figuring out the optimal configuration of towers. An additional layer of strategy comes in the form of being able to upgrade existing towers instead of building new ones. Once one has discovered the “best” layout of towers for a particular map, the game ends up consisting of watching your iPhone-controlled opponents struggle and fail to get across while you sprinkle upgrades and swap towers here and there.

There are three maps to choose from.

The game is as easy as you make it. On harder difficulty levels, it can be very challenging to micromanage (Yes, I said the “m” word.) your towers to ensure that the next wave of enemies doesn’t slip through a hole in your defenses. “Endless” mode is especially entertaining to try and “beat,” a victory here meaning creating the ultimate defense whose only weakness is your iPhone battery.

The biggest victory that Subatomic Studios’ has scored with Fieldrunners is the game’s controls. A tower defense game might seem daunting to adapt without a keyboard and mouse, but it’s very intuitive to simply drag the towers where you want them. Upgrading towers or selling them back is also very simple: just click the tower in question and tap on the appropriate option. This game could definitely have been rendered unplayable by bad controls, but thankfully this is not the case.

Graphics

The game uses sprites that are easy to distinguish from one another and there is enough variety in terms of locations, even though they all have the same general rectangular layout. The graphical effects can be described as “cartoon violence” more than anything else. Fieldrunners is overall a colorful, aesthetically appeasing game.

Sound

While there is no in-game music to speak of, the sound effects do their job well. Missiles explode on hit, a particularly slimy tower gives a hilariously gooey impression, and there’s nothing sweeter than the sound of multiple gatling guns, flamethrowers and rockets raining down on your targets. None of the sounds get too annoying, but it would have been nice if the enemy helicopters were a bit less noisy.

Conclusion

Fieldrunners is a definite must-buy for tower defense fans because of the expertly adapted touch screen controls, and the variety of stages and difficulty options make it accessible for anyone else. This is definitely one of the most replayable games on the App Store, if only for the appeal of squeezing every last minute out of the “Endless” mode.