Starship Patrol

a.k.a Starship Defense

Source // Nintendo

The Tower Defense genre has always been a home for small projects as well as large ones. It started with Flash games for your browser, and the gameplay is something that doesn't take much effort to get used to at all.

As such, it's an ideal genre for a downloadable Nintendo DSiWare title by the name of Starship Patrol, or your regional equivalent - and perhaps more obviously relating to its genre, Starship Defense.

You've got a starship to defend, and turrets to defend it with. You know the rest.

Plants vs. Zombies

Lawn of the Dead

Would it surprise anyone by now that I haven't played Plants vs. Zombies, at all, ever, in any form, on any device, since the 12 years that it has been out? I've not exactly got my finger on the pulse of what's hot or not, even when living right in the middle of it.

I guess I always cast it aside as little more than a mobile game, tower defense with silly characters. A game I just didn't want to play, no matter how easy it would be to do so. But here we are, finally seeing whether I was wrong or not. Again.

The living dead are approaching, and our last lines of defence are a bunch of plants. We're doomed.

geoDefense Swarm

Another one?

Source // Giant Bomb

I genuinely thought we'd seen all the Tower Defense genre had to offer. The 1001 list was adamant we saw a whole bunch of them, but once you've seen one, you've seen them all, no? What could geoDefense Swarm possibly add that we've not yet come across?

Neon colours? Is that it?

Fieldrunners

Don't you want to try shooting back?

Source // Steam

You're not bored of tower defence games, are you? Fieldrunners hopes not, because it wants to keep you glued to that new iOS device of yours...

Fingers at the ready, now.

PixelJunk Monsters

Pixel... Junk?

Defense Grid: The Awakening proved that you could have a graphically impressive tower defence game, but the power of the PlayStation 3 wasn't used for chucking out 3D models of invading aliens, but cartoony spiders in a somewhat chill and strangely named PixelJunk Monsters.

I'm aware of the name, but not of the game, so it's time to see what's going on.

Defense Grid: The Awakening

Coming back around for more? Alright then...

Tower defence games thus far have been simpler affairs, notably in the graphics department. I don't remember all the tower defence games the 1001 list has put in front of us, but the majority have been Flash-based lunchtime entertainment, not detailed 3D polygon models of animated alien invaders stealing chunks of our blummin' core, as is shown in Defense Grid: The Awakening.

Is a considerable bump in graphics enough to get me to pay more attention to the genre, or does the idea of tower defence just turn me off at its first utterance?

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.