The Defenders: The Second Wave Demo

The Defenders: The Second Wave is an 2D arcade platformer that focused on defense against massive waves of enemies.

Unlike other 2D games that usually push the player forward into the story and through various levels, in The Defenders: The Second Wave players are going to be sitting still, defending a single area. It’s not a big zone that needs to watch out for and in fact, the enemies are only attacking you and anyone who plays along.

The Defenders: The Second Wave can be played by a single player, but up to four players will be able to join a match. It’s built with multiple players in mind, and that is immediately obvious from the menus. Joining a match by yourself is possible, but it makes that game a lot more difficult than it would normally be.

The Defenders: The Second Wave features some pretty simple and clear gameplay concepts. Players get to control one of the available classes, and he has to defend an area that has a church. For some reason, various angry and dangerous ghost are attacking, and you need to survive.

In fact, the ghosts always seem to go after the players and not after the church. In any case, every enemy that you kill leaves behind money. Every few waves the players get a complex upgrade screen that allows them to invest the money in various areas, like the character, the weapons, their abilities, and the church itself.

This is pretty much the extent of the gameplay. You fight wave after wave of enemies, punctuated from time to time with a boss fight. Even if it might sound OK in theory, players still have to face the ugly truth.

The Defenders: The Second Wave is an ugly game, and there is no way around this. Everything seems to have been done in a hurry, from textures and down even to the characters and the animation.

The developer version for The Defenders: The Second Wave is pretty conclusive, and it’s a good way of figuring out if you like the game the way it is.