Apocalypseed

Whenever movies or video games feature an apocalypse, you are always presented the story of the people who do their best to prevent it, and they usually succeed. However, you almost never see the aliens win, or the asteroid actually hitting the Earth with full force. Well, not anymore, because the game at hand puts you in the role of the invaders and you get the chance to end civilization as violently as possible.

Apocalypseed is a casual tower defense game sporting simple 2D graphics and quite the interesting gameplay mechanics, as well as a unique approach to the “end of the world routine”. As such, you are in control of a race of plant monsters, which are slowly taking over the world and eating everyone that stands in their way. Your purpose is to train units and defend against the people who do their best to stop you.

The story is obviously not very intricate, and it’s of very little importance to the actual gameplay because you do not really need to know what’s going on in order to enjoy the experience. However, each new level you unlock features different objectives and sometimes entirely different mechanics, because you either have to destroy buildings, acquire a certain amount of human flesh, or just survive the incoming waves.

After you manage to beat a stage, you are rewarded with a number of points, which can be used between the levels to unlock certain bonuses for your units, or even acquire new units altogether. As such, you have the option to increase their damage, their speed and a variety of other attributes, in order to make it easier to survive the constant onslaught of humans.

Speaking of which, some of the enemy units have weapons that can inflict a lot of damage to your main building, unless you counter them with units of your own. Finally, the graphics engine is about as basic as you would expect from a 2D production, although the animations are cute and the environments are never too repetitive. The aliens are quite interesting as well, even if they are too small to examine properly.

In the end, Apocalypseed doesn’t take itself very seriously and neither should you, although that doesn’t mean you cannot get some hours of entertainment out of it. However, the rather linear scenarios make it difficult to enjoy multiple playthroughs, so one will have to do in most cases.