Power of Defense: Defend Your World Demo

There’s a reason tower defense games enjoy so much popularity, and it’s not necessarily just because they are accessible and rather simple to pick up and play. In essence, it’s about the thrill of coming up with a new tactic every once in a while and seeing how your actions make the difference between a victory and a loss. Without that, tower defense is nothing but wasted time and boring streams of units cluttering the screen.

Power of Defense: Defend Your World is more of a tug of war-like approach to the genre, in the sense that you build units instead of towers. However, the principle is the same, and in theory you could put just as much devotion into it if the mechanics are engaging enough. Unfortunately, the game fails to make the experience worthwhile or even pleasant, because everything seems to be designed in such a way as to make it impossible for anyone to have fun.

Before you plunge into the muddy waters of gameplay, you are greeted by the storyline, which tries to make it seem like it’s all fun and games, using childish humor and atrocious puns. As such, it all revolves around a sentient race of robots from another dimension, which for some reason find it imperative to invade Earth. In response, you must meet them between the parallel universes and use robots of your own to stop them, because that’s how these sort of problems are handled.

The game’s problem is quite simple and obvious, because you stumble into it from the first tutorial mission. In essence, both you and the AI opponent have the same robots with the same upgrades in the beginning, so there’s absolutely no way you can try different strategies and combinations. Hence, the first few minutes are all about chance, because the player whose robot shots first is the winner.

This removes any kind of pleasure or tactical option from the gameplay, at least in the beginning. However, since you first have to get past the first couple of waves in order to get further, you rarely get any chance to make use of the various upgrades provided by the game. The difficulty level is insanely high, but you cannot outsmart or trick it, because it’s all about chance, which is the exact opposite of what you want in a tower defense game.

In the end, it’s the technical aspect that brings Power of Defense: Defend Your World a few points, because the colorful graphics look pretty nice. The environments barely change over the course of the gameplay, however, so even that’s in vain, considering the fact that you only get to see a handful of tiny maps from start to finish.