Defenders of Ardania Hands-On - First Look

The 2011 Game Developers Conference is under way, and that means many game companies are on hand showing new and upcoming games to the press. We took the opportunity to visit with Paradox to see the upcoming tower defense game Defenders of Ardania and found the game to be as the developer described: "a tower defense game with a twist." Like in a standard tower defense game, you have a certain amount of ground on which to build, and a certain number of towers you can place to defend yourself from oncoming monsters, but this time around, the oncoming monsters are controlled by opponents with their own towers, and you can assault your foes with auto-attacking critters of your own. In a way, Defenders of Ardania is a bit like the popular Defense of the Ancients modification for Warcraft III, except that there are no hero characters to slaughter neutral "creep" critters and pound on towers. Instead, there are just creeps and towers, and to win, your towers must defend your headquarters from damage long enough to let your creeps get behind enemy lines and destroy the enemy HQ.

Defenders of Ardania has three playable factions, the "underworld" (which commands demons and the walking dead), "civilized" (human soldiers), and "monsters" (goblins and other fantasy-themed critters). Each faction has eight different types of towers with different properties, such as long-range sniper turrets that deal huge damage to a single faraway target, or a support tower that radiates an attack bonus to any nearby friendly creeps. Each faction also has eight classes of creeps, from standard foot-soldier grunts to critters with special powers, such as bonus damage to enemy towers, or flying. There's an approximate rock-paper-scissors balance among the different towers and critters that you'll have to guess at correctly or suffer the consequences. Fortunately, you can repair your own damaged towers or delete them outright to replace them with a more-appropriate turret. Better still, Defenders of Ardania has no fog of war, so if you want to see what kind of critters your opponent is sending your way, all you need to do is nudge your mouse pointer in the direction of your rival's base to take a peek.

In addition to just plopping down towers (each map will have a set, maximum number of towers you can have in play at any time) and churning out creeps, you gain experience points for killing enemy creeps and continually earn in-game money as time passes. Experience points unlock upgrades for different creature types, and gold can be used to purchase upgrades to your critters, towers, and your general economy, making new creatures or upgrades cheaper or faster to build. This is intended to be a fast-paced, competitive strategy game with quick, easy-to-use hotkeys; generally, hovering your mouse over a specific tile or tower and pressing the space bar pulls up a context-sensitive menu to either build a tower on an empty tile or repair/delete an existing tower. You call out units by pressing the "U" key and then scroll around your available critters with the arrow keys and use the space bar to deploy them.

The game will have a single-player campaign that consists of about 10 missions and will act as a primer for multiplayer, for which the game will have an additional two to three maps, as well as a larger map for a two-versus-two battle (the game supports a maximum of four players simultaneously, either in free-for-all, two-versus-two team play, or two-versus-the-computer cooperative play). Paradox intends to keep the game's price point low and to keep a close eye on community feedback to point the game's future development in the direction of what the players want, whether that be more towers, more maps, or a new faction. Defenders of Ardania's unique gameplay sets it apart from other tower defense games. The game is planned for the PC, the iPad (with no multiplayer, unfortunately), and, with any luck, consoles, later this year.