Glory Days - Tactical Defense

If you've ever played a game from French developer ODenis Studio, you'll already have experienced its quirky attitude and the odd combination of barebones gameplay that's yet so full of life.

It's something underlined by Glory Days - Tactical Defense, which is the prequel to Glory Days 2, a Nintendo DS title released over three years ago.

War remains the main course, although the stakes have been altered. This time around you're protecting a road for imminent invasion, with tower defence-style gameplay being the driving force.

Towers are built via rolling a large wireframe cube across the plains and mountains. Available units can be selected from the touchscreen, and then placed with a simple press of the A button. Upgrades and repairs can also be issued on built towers.

Once you've got the basic layout complete, enemies will roll and swoop in from one side of the playing area. Your task is to stop them from reaching the goal on the far side.

As the waves become tougher, you'll need to place down even more towers and make sure you've got a wide spread of tower classes to deal with each type of enemy that comes trundling along.

Still, where previous ODenis Studio games such as Pop Island have used their simplistic gameplay and barebone structure to their advantage, Glory Days isn't so well designed.

While the fast-paced action can become rather intense once you've reached the fiftieth wave and beyond, on the whole it's all a little underwhelming.

Enemies charge in, you take them out, you build more towers, and the cycle repeats. After a few playthroughs, I was already finding the action dull and longed for variety.

In addition, only three maps are provided, each with multiple difficulty settings that allow enemy troops to travel along various routes and through the water. This isn't enough to mix up the action and add excitement though.

Equally, while the in-game manual states that players can 'build up to 150 units', I rarely got even close to this number, as the number of credits provided is limited.

This is also a game in dire need of a tutorial. Barebones the gameplay may be, yet it took me a while to understand what each of the different towers was used for.

The digital manual gives descriptions but no pictures, reducing me to trial-and-error. A short introduction to each unit type wouldn't have gone amiss.

Hence, certainly quirky in the manner we've grown to expect from ODenis, Glory Days - Tactical Defense doesn't quite delight in the manner of its previous games.