Although initially unimpressive, it's innovative and highly addictive!

User Rating: 8.5 | Defenders of Ardania X360
As a long-time fan of tower defense games and the PC series of (incredibly strange and often difficult) Majesty games, I tried the demo and bought it after the first level.

It's a solid, engaging blend of traditional wave-based tower defense, but with the debate-ably new feature of simultaneous wave-based Tower OFFENSE. The controls are sparse but adequate, the graphics are pleasant (but perhaps a bit crowded with all health bars enabled), and the 2x speed mode is fast enough to keep things moving. The Majesty "bounty" mechanic is here (as in, "prioritize targeting of this guy", but not sticky like it was in Majesty.

The difficulty is perhaps just a bit easier than "just right", except for the rare levels where destroying the enemy bases unleashes "boss" enemy types. These are certainly defeatable, but only after realizing that you have to play tricks with selling and rebuilding towers to screw up their path detection. Perhaps if the Bounty system would cause Heroes to abandon their attack path and solely focus on bountied targets, this issue would be resolved.

The campy comedy and stellar Connery-clone narrator have returned as well, which adds a few laughs from start through the credt-roll. Unfortunately, a couple of the other voice actors are incredibly awful.

Multiplayer and achievements have enough bugs to warrant avoiding (for now). All together, this is well worth a purchase for any tower defense fan looking for something a bit different, and I look forward to some cleanup and expansion to this new style of hybrid gameplay -- all while keeping that Majesty "hands off the characters" oddly appealing play-style.