Monster Trouble

I often wonder what would happen to these quaint fantasy villages if a hero didn’t happen to be passing as the forces of evil attack.

Going by every game ever made, you’d expect the townsfolk to stand about looking helpless, no doubt spawning an ever-increasing number of question marks from their heads as their homes are ransacked.

In Monster Trouble, there are no passing heroes to help out the motley band of peasants, fire-breathing circus acts, and buxom 'Gipsies' [sic]. So they do what any sane individual would in a time of peril: build lots of towers and defend.

Actually, it’s you who builds the towers and pops the townsfolk inside. Obviously, the goal is to repel the waves of goblins, ogres, and the infuriating wraiths with their incredibly annoying poison attacks.

Each of 30 levels tasks you with defending a location using a selection of buildings and recruits. While the types of defences available to you expands as you progress, the types of buildings you carry into a mission have to be decided in advance.

The buildings aren’t like traditional tower defence games, in that they don't fire automatically. Instead, buildings serve to protect units, which attack enemies. Towers vary in strength with some of the most expensive structures housing up to three defenders at once.

There are also support buildings like wells and markets that help provide water for putting out fires (caused by goblins with explosive vials) and keeping your men healthy.

As such, there’s no need to be exact with the placement of your defences. Since your troops can be moved at will, you can reassign the purpose of each defensive building on the fly purely by dropping someone else into the tower instead.

Enemies aren’t stupid enough to waltz down carefully constructed corridors of death even if you do try and play the game like a more traditional tower defence. Should one of your defenders start firing on the monsters, they don’t just try and shrug it off and suicidally rush for your base, but instead turn around and charge the offending tower.

The combination of adjustable troop positions, striking 3D graphics, and a light element of resource management gives Monster Trouble a traditional real-time strategy feel.

It’s worth pointing out here that Monster Trouble looks fantastic. The detailed animations, excellent incidental details such as working windmills, and the rolling green fields are a delight to watch, even when you have hundreds of goblins bearing down on your town.

Some of the strategy elements of Monster Trouble don’t quite add up, however.

The system for quenching fires is a little harsh, for instance. Fires are incredibly destructive, but the wells you need to build to produce the water take their sweet time saving your men from a painful death.

Another annoyance is the frequency of money and items dropped by defeated enemies. It's the only way you can build up your defences, so having a whole wave drop no money - not even a single healing potion - can be a nail in your coffin.

Still, these two points are minor. Monster Trouble may not have a hero among its cast of colourful characters, but it's more than capable of holding its own against the waves of tower defence titles on iOS.