Final Fortress

Tower defense games have gained a lot of popularity recently, mainly due to the massive influx of new titles that hit the market and tried to innovate the genre in every possible way. While the game at hand is not a full-on tower defense, it does feature some very similar elements, all of which work together to provide you with a challenging, yet enjoyable experience.

Final Fortress is a top-down survival game that gives you control over a powerful turret and throws you into the middle of the war zone, where hordes of enemies keep on charging at you. Beside the fact that you can use the turret to shoot them, it is also possible to place various other units on the map, which provide you with even more firepower to fight back against the invading army.

As it is customary with titles like these, the difficulty level keeps on rising as you advance through the stages, which causes an increase in enemy numbers and affects their movement speed as well, making them slightly faster as well. Toward the end, it becomes quite difficult to keep up with all of them and it is vital that you spend the money on as many helpful gadgets as possible.

Although the game starts off rather slowly, things quickly get out of hand you have to put in quite a lot of effort to keep up with the incoming foes. Fortunately, the mechanics are quite refined and you do not have to worry about the bullets once they leave the barrel, as long as your aim is true. However, the units themselves behave rather erratically, especially when it comes to pathfinding.

Visually, the top-down perspective does not allow for too much detail, but the units are very nicely drawn and animated, complete with good-looking particle effects. The landscapes, on the other hand, are rather repetitive, which is definitely worsened by the fact that the levels are a bit too long, with not enough variety going around to make it worth the effort.

In the end, Final Fortress is only fun in short bursts, since it quickly gets very repetitive and annoying, regardless of how you decide to play it. It doesn't innovate the genre in any way and it simply chooses to re-use a lot of old gimmicks and mechanics to present you with a dull experience.