Posts with ‘Puppygames’ Tag

Revenge of the Titans Beta

By: Derek Yu

On: May 26th, 2010

The beta version of Revenge of the Titans recently came out. Puppygames, the creators of Droid Assault and Titan Attacks, have worked their mojo over the tower defense genre this time, crafting a fun game that looks and sounds great. Hats off to Puppygames’ artist, Chaz Willets, for creating a distinct art style that improves upon his previous work in every way. It’s awesome.

This free demo is quite long, and features some 20-odd levels that charge you with protecting your home base with turrets and other, more exotic, weapons. In between levels you can also research new lines of technology to bolster your defenses. This research costs money that’s earned during battle, either from destroying gidrahs (the game’s requisite hostile alien race), collecting power-ups, or harvesting energy crystals using refineries.

Reloading turrets and collecting money from refineries is handled manually by the player, by clicking on them. One of the main challenges in the game is keeping track of your turrets and refineries and making sure that they’re always firing or collecting whenever possible. Although it makes the game feel more frantic, it also reeks slightly of unnecessary micromanagement. That, and I think it might impact the strategy of the game negatively, putting too much emphasis on keeping your buildings close together (the strange acceleration of the map scrolling doesn’t help).

Another problem is that you can get kind of screwed later in the game if you’ve done badly, either by not harvesting enough crystals or by frittering away your research on things that you don’t end up using. It is possible to start over at any previous level, but right now the game doesn’t appear to update your starting state with subsequent replays. And alas, there’s really no way to know what kind of research you need until the challenge starts ramping up dramatically. Oh well.

Those issues aside, I’m having a good time with the beta and decided to purchase it for its pre-order price of $13.37 (the final game will cost $27.72). Unlike many tower defense games that move at a plodding rate, Revenge of the Titans is very fast-paced, and the production values are top-notch. I also like the levels are somewhat randomized each time you play. It doesn’t seem like it’s making any sweeping innovations to the genre, but the execution really enhances what makes these games so addictive. Definitely my favorite Puppygames project so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Droid Assault

By: Derek Yu

On: May 7th, 2008

Droid Assault

Droid Assault is a new action game from Puppygames. Just as Titan Attacks was a “Puppified” version of Space Invaders, and Ultratron a Puppified Robotron, Droid Assault is Paradroid given the Puppy treatment.

In Paradroid, players controlled an “Influence Device,” an otherwise weak droid with a very special ability – it could control and command droids after beating them in a logic-based circuit game. Droid Assault eschews this mini-game and lets you “transfer” to a droid so long as you have enough transfer points (obtained per 1000 score points). Also, once a droid has been transferred, it joins your team and can be controlled at any time (or when your current droid is blown up).

Longtime Paradroid fans may find this a bit off-putting, since the circuit mini-game was a big part of Paradroid (and allowed skilled players to take over even the mighty level 999 droid with a lowly Influence Device). However, Droid Assault is clearly built for speed and action, and as such it’s a highly enjoyable game with frantic action. The graphics and music are also ace, as we should come to expect from Caspian Prince and his team.

If I had any complaint, its that it’s occasionally difficult to discern blocks, pits, walls, and floors. Other than that, I’d highly recommend this very affordable ($10) little game. (And give Freedroid a try if you’d like to play the original!)