First Impressions: Squadron TD Beta
Last Updated on Thursday, 23 June 2011 02:12 Written by Aaron Hartley Saturday, 26 March 2011 07:31
Squadron TD Beta is another tower defense game is the sea of tower defense games that exist out there in the various formats. I have played several TD games on different platforms and really haven’t been very impressed overall with the repetition and un-originality of the games since its original inception in Age of Empires. This new map (still currently in Beta) i actually stumbled on by accident, so i decided while i was there i would do a write up for it.
Getting into the game i stared at the screen in some kind of confusion. I honestly had no idea what to do, and i definitely was not the only one, as 1 person for both teams left about 2 mins into the game. Games NEED to start spelling out what to do, especially when the game has the kind of complexity as this one. So i fumbled through my first game somewhat successfully (as successful as you can be when you have no idea what to do, but this wasn’t the first TD game I’ve played) and our team ended up winning. I went back into the game a second time with a bit more of an idea of what to do. The game is a 4 v 4 (Thats right, versus) TD game, now where this definitely isnt the first TD where its teams pitted against each other the format in which its done is quite novel. The game consists of 2 resources, firstly minerals that are used to make and upgrade towers, and secondly gas which is used to send units against your opponent team. Now this necessitates players in each team to not build towers, and instead build SCVs to mine gas, to attack your opponents. Tower Defense as a genre is never going to be accused of being a fast paced game type, but spending your resources to build SCVs really does not leave you with much to do. I had a look at the red player in this game and he had NO towers, just SCVs and he was just building attacking units to send against us. I cant imagine that to be very much fun and unless you were trying to finish God of War on your PSP.
The second point which makes this Tower Defense unique is the fact that you level up, not only in the current map, but in general. I was level 5 in my first game and logged in again to discover i was still level 5! A very interesting concept indeed as growing in levels opens up new tower builders, up to a maximum of level 50. I managed to unlock the 2nd tower builder which seemed to be the most popular builder ( as there was people at lvl 25+ in both games).
Overall the game was a minor distraction of about 20 mins, as the game lengths dont really last much longer from 10mins as i discovered. While the game was somewhat entertaining i would personally stick to the Blizzard Tower Defense game in Warcraft 3 which is still in my opinion the king of the TD.
