Crystal Defenders: Vanguard Storm

Tower defence copycats are like crystal: hard, transparent, and likely to shatter under the weight of your expectations. Fortunately Crystal Defenders: Vanguard Storm has been carved from another rock, one tinted with a different style of defence-oriented gameplay. It wisely opts out of the tower defence formula for an approach that is both fun and fresh.

Your objective in Vanguard Storm is to prevent enemies approaching at the left from reaching the right side of the screen.

Each stage plays out in waves with enemies moving in turns. For every step to the right that enemy forces take, you have a few seconds to arrange your units for the defence. Should any creatures make it all the way to the right, the stage is lost.

The battlefield is split in two, your units restricted to the 4x4 grid on the right. You're compelled to move them within the confines of the grid, however, to defend against encroaching forces. Redeploying a unit takes a slide of your finger. Once moved, a unit automatically acts when the turn ends; in short, your characters attack and enemies advance.

Cleverly repositioning your units is vital to beat back the varied enemy formations that stream in from the left. An enemy will attack a unit in the space to its right, so moving your characters around also serves to preserve their health.

This is only the first tactical layer to be experienced in Vanguard Storm, though, the second stemming from smart leveraging of character classes.

You begin each stage with a small band of fighters, though can draft additional units at set intervals in each stage. It's in your best interests to keep your units alive, since combat experience goes toward strengthening veteran characters.

Eight classes - Soldier, Archer, Dragoon, White and Black Mages, Flintlock, Bishop, and Paladin - support a surprisingly diverse range of tactics. Which units you select are just as important as where you station them on the battlefield.

Coordinating a small squad of mixed classes under the pressure of time proves formidable in the later stages of the game. As you encounter stronger creatures, the game tests your ability to conceive of tactics on-the-fly.

Monsters resistant to physical damage, for instance, may require juggling your units or perhaps you need to move characters on the brink of death so as to get them in range of a healing bishop.

Vanguard Storm achieves a fine balance with its tactical gameplay by keeping the elements simple without diminishing the level of difficulty. The pressure of timed turns keeps the game moving and your brain on point to contrive successful defences against a slew of colourful creatures.

This could easily have been just another tower defence clone, but Vanguard Storm's solid gameplay and fine balancing are liable to shatter your expectations.