Battle For Earth

Planning a defense against invaders is always rather tricky, unless you have enough resources to completely seal the city you are trying to protect. However, even walls can be destroyed with enough firepower, and you can only survive for so long inside if the enemy decides to block the exits.

Battle For Earth is a 3D tower defense game in which your goal is to fortify a maze with all sorts of weapons in order to stop an advancing alien army. You can freely move around the map at all times, as well as zoom in, rotate the camera, or even jump into any of the towers and control them manually from a first-person view. There are also shortcomings, on the other hand, especially when it comes to balancing.

To begin with, each level is a different maze with different challenges, but you are usually free to position your towers in many possible places. Granted, these places are fixed, but you can at least choose what type of towers to build. Besides the pure firepower choices that damage the enemies as they pass nearby, you can also choose to erect bonus towers that increase the effectiveness of nearby ones.

One of the worst things about Battle For Earth is the fact that the enemies seem to be nothing more than empty polygons most of the time, which is pretty annoying. Granted, you can concentrate in the actual strategy and forget about how the aliens look, but it can be distracting every now and again. Thankfully, at least the controls are simple and to the point.

The graphics are fairly impressive for an indie production, but don’t expect anything extraordinary either. It’s nice to see that the developers gave it their best shot in regards to level design as well, because each stage looks like it has some sort of central idea. Granted, the textures and the objects are very repetitive, but then again that’s quite normal for a tower defense game.

Even if it lacks variety in aspects like enemies, graphics and level design, Battle For Earth is still pretty challenging and fun. Thus, it should be a great way to waste a few minutes every now and again.