14 DAY TRIAL // Whenever you hear the words Tower Defense, you automatically remember the classic real-time strategy game that everyone used to play some while ago. What made the title so popular was its simplicity in design, where all you had to do was defend an objective by buying, upgrading and placing defensive towers in strategic positions over the enemy’s assault route.
In its early days, back in the 1990s, the tower-defense concept was just being developed and, after a while, world-class strategy games like StarCraft and WarCraft used this new style by creating special maps where you had to defend certain waypoints by placing units and defensive structures in order to fight off the enemy.
Circuit Defenders is one of the latest breeds when it comes to exploiting the tower-defense strategy. Sector3 Games have really managed to capture the essence of a fast-paced strategy game and combine it with quality graphics and addicting gameplay. The rules of the title remain the same, to build, upgrade and defend an objective, in this case a computer.
Just like any game, this one has a story behind it as well. As it seems, a vicious computer virus is trying to take over every computer in the world, by gaining access through their communication ports. It is your mission to protect the circuit boards and stop the invading threat before every computer in the world becomes infected, and, as the developer nicely said, “Shutdown is not an option.”
Right in the main window, when you start the game, you will be faced with the task of selecting the difficulty level for the played map. Each of the three options has its own gameplay features that you can learn about before experiencing them first-hand while in the game. For instance, while in easy mode, your upgrades will be instant and every projectile can pass through all the circuit elements, without stopping when they reach an obstacle.
The so-called battle field is a carefully designed and detailed circuit board with transistors and circuit paths where you will have to strategically place your towers in order to inflict maximum damage to the enemy. Each wave is characterized by a certain number of invading troops or units, which have special abilities such as increased speed or armor. As the game progresses and you buy more and powerful towers that are fully upgraded, the enemy changes as well. They will have increased life points, speed and some of them will fire back at your towers, inflicting considerable damage and even destroying them.
Besides this classic gameplay, Circuit Defenders offers you six new powerups that you can instantly use either on your enemies to stop or destroy them or on your own towers, such as upgrades, full healing, shielding or a money boost. All of these are vital during combat because they can give you just the advantage you need to keep the fight going.
While in a classic tower-defense game you only had a maximum of two, maybe three tower types that you could use, Circuit Defenders offers an impressive twelve friendly structures that you can build and upgrade. Each of them has its own ability, from the Gattling Gunner, Flame Thrower and Missile Thrower, to specific game structures such as Mega Booster and Nuclear Power. The last two are especially useful when you want to boost the firepower of the surrounding units near the Mega Booster and, at the same time, use the Nuclear Power structure so that the boosting power doesn’t get depleted.
The reason for his large number of friendly units is because you also have eleven enemy troop types to fight off. The invasion begins with small and light infantry such as the Scout, Truck or APC and as the game evolves, with each wave the enemy gets stronger and faster until you will be faced with extreme combat units such as the Mortar, Bomber and even the mighty Mega Truck.
What would a strategy game be without a detailed statistic of each unit’s ability and individual upgrade of their primary functions? Circuit Defender makes no exceptions to this rule and with a simple click on either a friendly or enemy unit, a stats panel will open allowing you to view critical attributes such as health, damage, fire rate and target range. For your towers, each of these can easily be upgraded individually up to eight times their initial value or you can choose to sell the structure and replace it with a more powerful one.
Another special feature of the game is the ability to fast-forward the game movement up to six times its normal rate. This can prove to be very useful, especially when you know you have a solid defense and you need the game to run faster so that you can make more money and see what enemies you will have to fight next.
If you get tired of the default maps offered by the game, you will also be able to create your own customized circuit board, where you can choose and place any transistor wherever you want and however you want to. This is the perfect opportunity to let your imagination run wild and create the perfect battlefield scenario, where you can have an advantage over the invaders.
The gaming experience can be somewhat addictive, mostly because you can play on a huge number of circuit boards and you can always choose another defending strategy. The large variety of units makes it even more captivating, because you constantly have to build and upgrade them. The thrill of viewing your laser turrets pounding the invading troops has been carefully and skillfully rendered with great graphics effects that look like something out of a science fiction movie.
Circuit Defenders is way better than any of its predecessors and you will find yourself burning a lot of daylight while playing it and waiting for the next enemy wave to attack. I have to say that the game was built in such a way that the more you play it, the more you want to play it. Although you lack the ability to save the state of your current battle for future gameplay, perhaps the reason is to keep you playing until the end and surrendering is not an option.
Update: You can save the game at any moment just by pressing the Escape key and clicking "Save Game State". You also have the ability to save the game at multiple levels of difficulty and then return to each of them whenever you're ready. That's a feature you can exploit any time you want to call it a night without losing any of your progress, regardless of the levels you've been playing.
From a personal experience, I found the game to be well worthy of being played over and over again mostly because the boring factor was extremely low. Still, you have been warned that the game can get under your skin, and, if you want to try this out for yourself, you could play the free demo version for starters and then work your way up to buying the game with all its features unlocked, for only 9.95 Australian dollars.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
