CastleStorm Review

People either understand the appeal of the tower defense genre or they don't. To one person, the endless procession of enemies in search of a conquest represents an exhilarating opportunity to face off against overwhelming odds and to finally emerge triumphant, time after satisfying time. To someone else, the genre all too often offers only tedium. There's too little variety, no competitive element, and not nearly enough action. Occasionally, though, a new game presents a fresh take on the timeworn mechanics, one that has the potential to delight veterans and newcomers alike. CastleStorm, a new release from Zen Studios, is one such game.

Seize the day and storm the castle!

Your primary goal in CastleStorm is to protect your castle from invading forces. In this case, those forces are aggressive Vikings who hope to use a pair of powerful crystals to enslave the world. As the mostly inconsequential story begins, one half of the required pair is located deep within your castle. Predictably, you have to stave off a seemingly endless army of goons if you want to survive long enough to find a way to end the bloodshed.

CastleStorm's most important twist is that you aren't limited to a purely defensive role. A typical map includes castles along both the left and right edges. Each of those structures is armed with a ballista that can be used to bring down rival troops, or to unleash shrapnel on the structure that spawns them (a process that feels reminiscent of Angry Birds, minus the pigs). If you can topple your rival's tower quickly enough, you won't even have to worry about planning for long-term survival. Missions offer varying objectives, but in general, you win either by knocking down your rival's front gate and stealing his flag or by reducing his glorious castle to a pile of rubble. As an added bonus, destroying individual rooms makes the overall structure less productive. Destroying a cellar stops a food production buff, for instance, and annihilating an architect's chambers decreases the building's defensive capabilities. Multiple paths to victory mean that the game remains fresh for longer than it otherwise would, and a single strategy won't conveniently carry you to the end of the campaign.

Your projectiles pierce even the most foreboding darkness.

Besides ordering troops and hurling javelins, stones, bombs, explosive sheep, and other such projectiles at a rival's castle, you can activate as many as five unique spells over the course of a battle. These special abilities typically have a cooling period you must wait through before you can use them again, as does most of your ammunition. By managing each element well, you can really change the tide of battle, particularly if you're smart about when you summon your hero to the fray. Once you drop him on the battlefield, you control him directly as he slashes and shoots his way through whole enemy groups until his timer or life meter drains. Summoning a hero is a great response to situations when weaker enemies such as wolves and foot soldiers manage to sneak past your broader defenses.

There's much to keep track of in CastleStorm, but the control scheme is typically up to the challenge. Each attack method that you might care to employ is assigned to a single face button, making it a cinch to swap one for another as needed. Within those categories, individual units are then selected by pressing the bumper buttons so that you can easily control as many as 15 different elements without constantly needing to sort them. As an example, you might fire a stream of javelins at a castle wall while you wait for enough resources to be accrued that you can summon a griffin. Then you tap the appropriate button twice, and out flies your winged beast. Meanwhile, you've already switched back to your ballista, or perhaps you've quickly cast a spell. Once you familiarize yourself with the controls, nearly everything is handled effortlessly.