Pirate Legends TD is a highly polished tower defence title. Its animation is stunning, and the units you're fighting with and against are positively dripping with imaginative design touches.
Sometimes it's fun to just sit back and watch the puffs of smoke and gobs of oil as they burst out of your cannons.
But underneath that polish there's another standard tower defence title. It might be set at sea, it might throw the odd fresh idea into the mix, but there's nothing here that fans of the genre aren't going to have seen before.
It's solid and dependable, but it's nothing new.
Pop-up piratesThe game casts you as a pirate captain out to defend your booty from the navy, other pirates, and anyone else who happens to stumble across the sights of your guns. Your base is your ship, and across each map you'll find specific points where you can build towers.
These are as standard as you like. Shooty ones, area of effect ones, magical ones that bypass armour, and ones that fire out blobs of sludge to slow down the advancing waves. All of them cost coins to build, and you can upgrade them to become more powerful.
Your ship has a cannon too, as well as a couple of special shots. One of these fires out a turtle with a cannon, the other hurls a barrage of shots in a direction of your choice. These take time to recharge after use, so you need to make sure you don't waste them.
The flying support you unlock after a couple of rounds is a nice touch. You set a beacon and your pilot flies around this, firing at anything that gets in its way.
As you'd expect, enemies have various strengths and weaknesses, and you can call waves in early for extra bonuses.
Tower shipsThere's a decent progression system that sees you spending anchors to strengthen your weapons. The harder the difficulty setting you play a level on the more anchors you earn for completing it, meaning you get the chance to balance risk and reward however you see fit.
The easier difficulty setting is a bit too easy, and once you've built up your defences you can almost lay your iOS device aside and wait for the waves of enemies to dash themselves to death against your cannon balls and spells.
Harder settings offer far more of a challenge, and if you're a tower defence veteran you should definitely push to the top of the scale to start with.
Levels have multiple attack points, allies you can hire to your cause, and shipping lanes you can attack to gain more cash. There's usually something to keep you on your toes, but it's rarely something you haven't seen in another game before.
An old legendIn a way, Pirate Legends TD is like a greatest hits album for the tower defence genre, with a couple of new songs thrown in here and there to keep you on your toes. It's brilliantly well put-together, and all of the new bits, like the flying support and the magic spells you can buy, fit in quite nicely.
If you're looking for a respectable tower defence game that's challenging at times and looks great, then Pirate Legends TD is the game for you. If you're looking for a game that's going to breathe life into a staid genre, then move along.