Desktop Tower Defense

"Not having enough fun?"

The tower defence genre is a simple one to describe. A wave of enemies will swarm in from a set direction, charging towards a given objective. You've got the resources to build a manage a bunch of turrets that will automatically track, fire, and hopefully kill the enemy before they reach their destination. The more enemies there are, the more towers you'll need to defend against them, or the better those towers will have to be.

You can already see the gameplay. Slow-moving but powerful towers, quick but weak-hitting towers, towers with magical abilities or towers that specifically target a certain enemy. Of course! Multiple enemy types. Slow-moving drones, zippy little pests, flyers and bosses.

There are so many possibilities, but one developer wondered why no tower defence game had really allowed players to create mazes that enemies were forced to navigate through. Most had shown players a route and tasked them with placing towers to the sides. Desktop Tower Defense didn't.

Fun Times

Still available in the dark corners of the Internet where Flash content is enabled, or, in my case, through the likes of Flashpoint Infinity, Desktop Tower Defense is a simple little game that you'll be able to dive into with no problems.

A number of modes are available, but at its core, the game involves you using money earned from successfully eliminating enemies to invest in a web of dangerous towers designed to kill more enemies. Do you pack the field with peashooters, or stick in some towers that are more capable at range, or are harder-hitting?

Running along the bottom of the screen is a timer that tells you what kind of wave is coming up next, and all they want to do is stream in from one side of the screen to the other. They won't attack you back, but each enemy that successfully navigates your defences will cause you to lose a life.

You can, at any time, sell a tower that isn't working for you anymore, and build new ones to take on bigger foes. You can even upgrade towers, at a cost, to increase their attributes.

The game isn't much to look at or listen to, with a digital camera image of a desktop serving as your background, scribbled images as your turrets, and high-pitched speech and sound effects filling your ears with every squished enemy, but it is kind of charming.

There were amazingly well-produced Flash games back in the day, but you didn't need to be one to be successful. Desktop Tower Defense isn't the flashiest (no pun intended) and is in no way one of the worst, sitting in a middle ground of doing just enough. Just what it needs to do.

During gameplay though, are you doing what you need to do? Do you have enough gold to stick a new tower into play? Are you efficiently funnelling the enemy into the kill box?

Eventually, through your mismanagement of funds or badly placed defences, more enemies will cross over the desktop than you can handle, and your run will come to an end. This score won't be hitting the high scores anytime soon, but a reset is just a click away.

Heading into the Challenge Mode gives some alternative ways to play, and being given 4,000 gold coins to just build a bunch of towers and see how well they do - no selling or upgrading once you hit go - seemed like the best option for me.

With all of this gold, you're able to immediately upgrade your defences to see how mighty some of them get. Frost towers that slow the enemy down become Blizzard towers, there are Quake towers that thump the ground and stun enemies. The dart tower even upgrades into an ICBM launcher.

Getting a couple of the big guns out, I flood the field with pea shooters and sit back to watch the fireworks.

11 levels in and some turrets haven't even fired yet. If I'm feeling lucky, I can send in the next wave early for a better score. Seeing as I don't have to control anything in this mode, I might as well at least speed things along.

As the waves went by, I noticed I had the most trouble with those that split into two when they first die, and I believe two more after that. The first two or three showings of these guys were alright, but as they kept increasing in health, my turrets just weren't placed well to deal with them.

Enemies will find a path through, and my layout wasn't a maze so much as it was a mess. I wasn't really slowing anyone down to have them be shot at by something else, I was just loading the field with turrets because I could.

That strategy just won't work, though. Not in the long run. Some waves were fine, others just blitzed through, and all it takes is twenty enemies for your run to come to an end.

Final Word

And once you've got the gist of what Desktop Tower Defense is, that's about that. There's depth, yes, but enough to keep you around for game after game?

When it was first released, it spread across the Internet through word of mouth, with millions of games being played. For someone who initially didn't make the game because he thought Flash was too complicated, that's quite impressive, and now it's in a 1001 must-play video game list, and preserved as part of Flash game history - and if Wikipedia is to be believed, it rakes in $100k in advertising revenue per year.

Is there a version that doesn't rely on Flash? Oh, yeah, look: it got a Nintendo DS release, and a sequel on Facebook. What I'm saying is that this humble little game made it to the big time, by being in the right place at the right time. Or by being a solid tower defence game. Or both.

But what I'm actually saying is that I've already played enough of it. Twenty minutes or so. A nice nostalgia trip, though to Flash, not necessarily to Desktop Tower Defense - I don't think I've played it before. I don't think I'll play it again.

Great gameplay for the genre? Iconic presentation? Dead platform? Desktop Tower Defense is, or was, a great little distraction. Until we found other ones. Give it a go.

Fun Facts

Some sound clips are pulled from old British TV show Ivor the Engine, a short animation series about a train.

Desktop Tower Defense, developed by Paul Preece, first released in 2007.

Version played: Flash, 2007.