GAME REVIEW: ‘Warrior Defense’ – MOBA for the Casual Gamer

A little disclaimer before I begin the review: I’ve never played a mobile tower-defense game before I was given Warrior Defense (FG’s resident gaming editor Ryan seems to think it a good idea because it should allow me to provide a “fresh insight” for one who’s unfamiliar with the genre. Or he’s probably just pulling my leg.). Consequently, I was also able to play DOTA once before rage-quitting it after five hours of being unable to win against the bots at its EASIEST difficulty setting, so there goes my “hardcore gamer” cred. Why did I even bothering mentioning that latter sentence, you may rhetorically ask? Well, it’s because of the fact that—and I may be completely wrong here, but no review is ever truly objective, when you come to think of it—Warrior Defense is how I imagined DOTA or LoL to be if it was ever made for mobile gaming. Or, at the very least, the game is probably the closest analogue I can ever find to those two genre-defining PC games of the last decade.

Of course, it nothing has to do with the character designs: the characters here are filled with the usual fantasy archetypes of warriors, mages, monsters, goblins, and some steampunk-inspired armored enemy knights. The fact that all those characters have been chibi-fied means that it’s very easy to mistake Warrior Defense for just about any other fantasy-themed game released on the Google Play store.

However, Warrior Defense probably shines most in the gameplay department, as it rightfully should be. It’s marketed as a “tower-defense” game, sure; however, you don’t just position defensive towers on the battle map. Those towers are filled with a couple of actual soldier units who will do battle for you as you frantically position and re-position your units on the map in the way you see fit.

And man, is it frantic, indeed! The first three maps actually acclimate you to the workings of the game, giving you occasional pop-up tutorials teaching you what kind of units to position (i.e. melee or ranged) in order to combat the baddies who are out to destroy the harmonious sanctity of Hethir (hint: that is the name of the world that you are supposed to be defending, if you do care about small details like these).

I’m also not quite sure if the leveling system Warrior Defense uses is supposed to be a “standard” for tower-defense games, but that is the specific point of the game where I did feel like I’m playing an RPG rather than the genre that it’s supposed to be taken as; you can level up your units mid-battle to allow them to dish out more devastating attacks (and, in some instances, actually venture out to a wider radius area than is commonly expected of it at the beginning of a battle) through the use of the “shard” unit. In essence, every purchase you will be making in-game—whether it be additional warrior classes or offensive/defensive upgrades—are transacted with the use of those shards.

You probably know where this is going already, do you? Yep, you can actually purchase shards with real-world money. However, as of this writing, the store that is supposed to redirect gamers who wanted to purchase shards was still offline. If anything, this is probably my biggest frustration with the game: by some arbitrary reason, I only got “enough” shards to spend for upgrading my units/abilities, no matter how well I performed at the last level (which the game is “grading” in the form of a 3-star system). Later levels make it also impossible to predict what kinds of enemies you will be bombarded with throughout the course of the battle, which almost always necessitates playing through said level a second time.

With the length of time each battle is being waged (the longest one I probably clocked in was at least 10 minutes), I found it really hard to sit through each one. I didn’t even get a standard “plot break” once I beat one level and went through the next, which only contributed to the rising sense of monotony I felt as I was playing it. However, I can only guess that this is the barometer at which most mobile games are judged nowadays; it lends well enough to being played with some “extrasensory” distraction, and this is probably the most recommended way of playing Warrior Defense: during public commutes, or when you’re absently watching primetime news at 6:30 in the evening.

However, that’s not to say that I’m just griping about the game; it actually boasts some top-notch production flourishes, and the game sounds more alive with the epic-sounding score provided by Dualist; seriously, I didn’t even need some headphones to appreciate its music through my tinny cellphone speakers. It also helped that the devs made their own version of tower-defense more “personal” with the addition of human warrior characters you can actually help indirectly by healing them or just plain fireballing their enemies. You’re essentially like The Sims’s omniscient controller, only more bloodthirsty.

Regardless, this first outing by Coffee Brain and Full Mana Studios is a very polished product that will surely prove to be a nice addition to the backlog of apps you probably already have in your smartphone. Things can only look up for them, and I’m eagerly awaiting what they have in store for us app-addled folks.

Get the game at the Google Play Store here.

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