Two Worlds 2 Castle Defense Demo

Tower defense games are quite simple in their nature, but the gameplay can get very intricate and difficult, depending on the developer and the mechanics that come into play. Castle defense is a kind of sub-genre, since you can recruit/train units instead of placing towers, which does sound quite interesting in theory. There are, however, some problems with the concept and they become pretty visible once you try one out.

Two Worlds 2 Castle Defense is one such attempt at the genre and it is obviously based in the same universe as the popular role-playing game, although it doesn’t really have too much else in common with it, other than the similar lore and some recurring characters when it comes to the background story. In essence, you just have to summon units and defend the castle and your hero against the unending hordes of enemies, which get stronger and stronger with every new wave.

In order to make such a game viable, you need to make sure that the A.I. is decent enough not to cause frustration during the matches, otherwise you might as well transform the soldiers into towers and avoid the problem entirely. The game at hand is stubborn enough to ignore this, which means that you often stumble into baffling situations, with your units refusing to attack nearby enemies and the like. The worst part is that you cannot manually command them to attack either, so you are kind of left to watch and swear most of the time.

You also have quite the limited selection of units to use in battle, which is disappointing to say the least, considering the fact that they are a huge part of the game and basically the entire point of the genre. On the other hand, you can use your hero to cast some pretty neat spells, which deal massive amounts of damage and they can get you out of sticky situations, as long as you have enough money saved for a rainy day.

The visuals are quite good as well, although they are of little importance when the rest of the game is a mess. You can see that the environments and the characters are nicely modeled, but they do not have the desired impact if you are not able to immerse yourself into the atmosphere. As you can probably anticipate, many landscapes are borrowed from the RPG, although the new perspective can make it difficult to recognize them.

In the end, Two Worlds 2 Castle Defense could have gotten a lot more out the idea, if only the developers had put more effort into it from the get-go. Instead, you are just presented with a short and buggy game with not nearly enough content to keep the interest level high for longer than ten minutes.