Game Reviews

Robo Defense

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Robo Defense
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You have to suspect that mediaeval architects would be rather good at tower defence games. They were, after all, the masters at designing devious ways to slow and control the flow of a large enemy advance.

Examine the layout of any grand old castle and you’ll find mazy high-walled approaches with plenty of openings for the defenders to fire and throw pointy objects from. You’ll find bottle necks that condense and detain numerically superior forces, forming deadly crossfire zones.

While Robo Defense on Android is set in the future, then, it has its feet firmly planted in the tactics of the past.

Mediaeval siege warfare isn’t the only thing the game borrows from, either. Put simply, this is a thinly disguised “tribute” to the enormously popular Fieldrunners. However, two major things go in its favour.

A field apart

First of all, there’s no sign (yet) of an Android version of Subatomic Studios’s masterpiece.

Second, Lupis Labs has added a number of neat features of its own to carry the game beyond cheap knock-off status.

The premise and the core level design are strikingly familiar, though. As in Fieldrunners, 100 enemy attack waves attempt to get from one side of the battlefield to the other.

Each attack can involve bog standard troops, lumbering tanks, zippy motorcycles, or an assortment of aerial units. Hence, you must deploy a similarly varied set of defences in the form of gun turrets, rocket towers, and ‘Slow Guns’.

As important as the type of armaments is how you deploy them. The idea is to set a kind of obstacle course for the enemy swarms, forcing them to take the least direct route possible to their goal and hence maximising their exposure to your weapons.

Varied attack

So far so Fieldrunners. Taken on these terms it’s a fairly bog-standard copy, at that, with murky, indistinct graphics that continue to make it hard to spot where enemies will come from until you’ve set your own defensive markers.

But behind all this, Robo Defense plays a decent game of tower defense on a platform that’s hardly blessed with prime examples.

Plus there are those additions we spoke of, chief of which is the facility to unlock and purchase new abilites and modifications. No only can you bolster each unit’s capabilities, but you can buy new turrets, such as one that returns enemies to the entrance of the battlefield.

Then there's the technology tree that (to name one example) sees you having to decide to upgrade your bog standard gun turrets to flame towers or anti-aircraft cannons. It's a welcome diversion from Fieldrunners’s rather more straightforward setup.

It’s all enough to transform Robo Defense from an average Fieldrunners clone to a good Fieldrunners clone.

It might not be the real thing, but thanks to Robo Defense the wait for Fieldrunners on Android isn’t half as agonising as it used to be.

Robo Defense

While it borrows a little too heavily from Fieldrunners, Robo Defense is a decent tower defense game that adds a welcome sense of progression to the relentless action
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Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.