A Clever, Well-Designed and Balanced Tower Defense Game From A High Quality Studio
Starship Defense is a DSiWare game released in January 2010 for the North American market. The game was published by Nintendo and developed by Q-Games, the studio behind DSiWare games such as Trajectile, X-Scape and Art Style: Digidrive. Other games from Q-Games include Starfox Command for the DS and the PixelJunk series on the PS3. Starship Defense is their third game released on the DSiWare service and costs 500 points ($5).
Gameplay Overview:
Like many other DSiWare games, the gameplay in Starship Defense is simple. At its core, Starship Defense is a tower defense game. The player starts as an ensign pilot in a starship fleet who is working his way up the ranks while defending your starship fleet from enemy attacks en route the enemy's base. Your trusty robot, the VIX (check out Q-Games' X-Scape for another VIX reference) guides you through a tutorial, builds new weapons and generally provides comic relief throughout the 30 missions. There are three groups of missions on the world map, each preceded by gate that requires the player to pass a certain number of missions before proceeding. Each mission consists of 10 waves with the last wave being a boss wave that repeats over and over again until the player has either lost all his hit points or defeated the boss. With each wave, a pre-determined number of enemy ships will proceed along a pre-defined path. As with all other tower defense games, the goal for the player is to keep the enemies from getting all the way through the path. To this end, the player places various weapons on fixed turrets on his ships. The weapons cost various amounts of energy, which is collected from fallen enemies. In addition, certain weapons are also locked until the player gains enough power crystals to build them. One power crystal is awarded with each successive wave survived in the mission. Finally, the player has access to SOS cards which produce certain effects such as destroying all enemies on the screen, calling a bounty hunter to destroy some enemies or restoring all your hit points. One SOS card is earned with each mission completed but the player can only carry three cards at a time. If the player destroys all the enemies in a mission, he or she is awarded a perfect rating for that mission. Attaining a certain number of perfect ratings will result in a ranking change for the player as well as new color decorations for VIX. Scoring a perfect rating while not using an SOS card nets the player a medal and a large point bonus at the end of the mission.
Liked:
1.) Overall Presentation: The general design is very simple with each map appearing like a sheet of grid paper onto which the ships are drawn to look like pencil sketches. As the player upgrades his weapons with range, power or speed powerups, color is added to the weapon to indicate the powered up status. Enemies are rendered as simple geometrical shapes with simple colors. The battle music sounds a lot like Star Wars, which is a good thing. There are about five tracks in the game, all of which are unlocked throughout the adventure to play from the world map. In short, the design is tasteful and unique.
2.) Concept: The concept of the game seems like a generic tower defense game but the setting of space combat along with the variety of weapons-there are nine in all-and enemies combine to keep the game feeling fresh all the way to the end.
3.) Replay Value: With thirty missions averaging 15 minutes apiece, the player will spend 7-8 hours just getting through the main campaign, assuming he or she passes each mission on the first try. To attain all the perfect ratings will require about 10-12 hours, while attaining the no-SOS perfect ratings will require an investment of about 15 hours. All in all, this is a great deal for $5.
Disliked:
1.) No Fast Forward Button: As mentioned above, each mission lasts approximately 15 minutes. Most of this time is spent placing weapons, upgrading them and watching enemies get blasted into bits. After the player has played a mission several times, the first few waves are relatively easy with the placement of one or two weapons sufficing to clear the screen of enemies. Including a fast forward button for these occasions would have been a user-friendly way of allowing the player to speed up the action.
2.) Fairly Repetitive: Though the concept feels fresh, this is not one of those games that a person can sit and play for hours and hours. Because of the nature of the genre and the lack of a fast forward button, the game does feel repetitive if the player plays for longer than 30 minutes or so. This may not be a criticism of the game so much as it is of the genre. However, including different goals for some missions would have given the player something to do besides the standard tower defense goals. To the developer's credit, they do fork the path on the world map several times so as to allow the player to move on to another mission if he or she cannot pass one.
3.) Relative Lack of Reward: Completing all 30 missions nets the player a congratulatory message. While obtaining the perfect rating for each mission upgrades the player's rank and adorns VIX with new decorations, Q-Games could have provided a little bit more back story or a flashy credits sequence to give the player a "thank you" for playing and incentive to complete everything in the game.
Conclusion:
Having played Ninjatown and Lock's Quest on the DS, I can say that this game, while graphically not at the same level as those two games, contains as much challenge and gameplay as those games. This game perfectly captures what DSiWare is all about, a game design that exploits one good idea or gameplay mechanic in bite-sized gameplay chunks. At 500 points, this game is an incredible value for those who appreciate strategy type gaming and own a DSi no matter if you are a completionist or not. I spent about 12 hours on the game and have completed all missions with 27 perfect ratings. As it is, I aim to achieve 30 perfects while looking forward to new DSiWare games from Q-Games.
Final Score: 8.5/10