Dead Defence

Strategy games can take many forms depending on whether they are in real time or they feature a turn-based system. However, simplicity is a sought-after quality nowadays as well, since more and more casual gamers want something easy to occupy their time with whenever they want to relax for a while. Hence, developers are much more likely to address this public than risk making a hardcore game for a crowd that’s very difficult to please.

Dead Defence is a tower defense game that’s about as simple as it gets in the genre, although maybe that’s not always such a great idea. In short, you have to make use of various towers in order to stop wave after wave of monsters from reaching the portal at the end. Unfortunately, the tower selection is very poor, and the gameplay mechanics are not particularly engaging either.

To begin with, there are only a handful of towers to choose from, and their role in the grand scheme of things is not very different anyway. Granted, they can be upgraded a couple of times to make them stronger, but don’t expect too many visual differences. Their role is very similar as well, so they don’t even have strategy advantages most of the time.

Although tower defense games are repetitive by nature, there are ways to avoid this, as well as let the players get more hands on with their defensive structures. This is not the case with Dead Defence, since you are not even allowed to place the towers where you want, given the fact that there are a handful of preset locations where the foundations are already laid for you.

The graphics do not impress in any way either, although they are not very bad. The environments and the creatures are pretty detailed, but there are no flashy special effects or anything of the sort. There’s no way to zoom in and get a closer look at the action, not to mention the fact that you have to click on arrows in order to pan the camera left or right.

There are much better tower defense games out there than Dead Defence, especially since this one is a mobile port in which no effort went to make it work better with a mouse. There are not enough towers or monsters to keep you engaged for more than a few short minutes.