Power of Defense "Short" Review.

Power of Defense (2011) Review

Power of Defense is a indie defense game made in the style of a tower defense game, developed by 4sdk and from my quick research this is the first commerical game they've done.

The main niche here that makes this game unique from other defense games is that instead of building towers you build the same minions as the enemy produces to kill you, the minions being bots that you assemble at your side. You gain income by making worker bots that gain the 'oil drum' like objects your bots and the enemy bots drop when killed. In order to win, you must get 10 bots across the lanes and into the enemies portal, the enemy does the same to you and you lose. As you play through the levels you unlock more bots that the enemy previously used against you by stealing the tech after defeating them.

I'll be straight with you, I did not like this game.. at all really. I was really disappointed with it because of a couple of very broken concepts of the game. As a developer that has created a game, you can change gameplay and clean up broken attributes in a fix up patch.. however you can't fix a game that was broken from the ground up, which is the circumstances that surround this title. To be fair, I will tell you the things I did find enjoyable, the bots are colorful and you can tell the difference between them ... on the other hand, your bots and the enemies do look the same so sometimes you will get confused. Well so much for praising it. With that out of the way, the rest is just garbage.

Story-wise the game is truly forgetable, your co-NPC "commander" (I use the word as loosely as a new vegas hooker) is annoying and takes forever to get through his meaningless words which seem to ramble on and on and on and on so damn slowly that I become disinterested even trying to begin to understand the story. The enemy NPC is just there to push through the levels. Sounds and music are trash, I had to turn them down as soon as I started playing.

Now the main gameplay which you may have noticed I mentioned earlier, there are some serious flaws here. The difficulty in this game is completely linear. I can't consider this a strategy game, because the AI hardly could be considered "strategic". The difficulty of this game isn't because the AI uses effective strategies, it's difficult because the AI has infinite money and can always produce more bots that you.

The gameplay heavily forces your tactics as well, you must play defensively or you will be out-pushed and lose. Period. This is because the fact is the bot will not harassing you because it never runs out of money and bots. In order to get income yourself, you must kill their bots and get yours destroyed. Unfortunately the enemy can also produce worker bots that will sap away the income barrels. Therefore you can't push your bots out too far or else your income will be taken away. Also, remember how I said you gain bots as you progress in levels? Well this is only after the bot is done using these powerful bots against you and you can't access them yet.. well done guys. These things cause a very frustrating experience because you know the developer is purposely wasting your time by padding out the limited levels avaliable, in order to spread the gameplay length. This is not difficulty. This is absolute annoyance!

(See this sight? Get used to this a lot until you get used to playing like a pansy!)

There are other gameplay designs that are very questionable. One of these is the upgrade system which you spend a lot of money in order to make your bots stronger, faster, etc. The catch here is that they are mostly worthless because they hardly allow your bots to survive longer, making them worthless for defending. Believe it or not, the upgrades actually make the game more difficult for you. This is because they make your bots more expensive which makes the bots harder to produce and causes them to push out further into the lanes, causing your income to be sapped. (Remember?) Many times you can easily over upgrade your bots, causing you to lose your income and then get out-pushed by the enemies constant production. A much better way to do this would be to make your bots the same price for upgrading but make it cost more income. Perhaps making addition upgrades more expensive as you buy them for balancing. It could have also been fixed by allowing you to turn off upgrades when you needed them. Perhaps you only wanting the speed boost on your worker bot to get more income, as the worker bot isn't very costly. Well, fuck that! Once you buy an upgrade, it's premanent for all bots that can use it.

Another thing is the balancing of the bots in general. Most of the game you can simply get by by using the beginning unit in the game, the shotgun unit. This is because the damage is causes is worth 2-3 times the normal pistol unit, so spamming this unit is the best defense you have. All other bots I saw were severly more expensive than this unit, making them worthless. The upgrades make them even more so. This is until the bot develops stun units that completely fuck over your shotgun unit and while these crowd control bots and extremely costly to make.

All of the contributes to forcing the player into one strategy to win effectively. You defend. HARD. You sit back and let them come into bottom lane and then spam shotgun bots, letting them die to collect your income. This would even allow you to just spam worker bots to die ineffectively, but "thankfully" enough you can only make units as the molds are produced, so you actually have to think a bit about when to make a bot and when to sit there staring at the matching army incoming.. this is because as stated earlier, the AI gets significantly more molds than you do at a faster speed. Always. Anyways, getting off-topic. After you sit there SLOWLY defending and produce a large income, you buy all your upgrades and make a huge push at the enemy base and hopefully score 10 bots inside. If not, you take your income and patiently build up again, hopefully the upgrades don't cause you lose all your income to this point.

If you are just looking for something cheap to waste your time with.. go buy a yo-yo. It's much cheaper. Seriously, there are better quality, free flash defense games out there, go ahead and try them instead. You can thank me.