Tower Defense Games: Oxymorons At Work
Aug. 19th, 2011 07:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mancalledtrueI hate the "tower defense" genre.
Trust me, I've come up with plenty of reasons why:
1. The entire genre is the same game a million times. It doesn't matter what coats of paint you give the towers, how you gussy up the enemies, or what your excuse for "monsters walking down paths" is today - it's all the same in the end. "Played one, played them all" is a common complaint about many video game genres, but it especially applies here.
I swear I've played the same maps a dozen times in a dozen different games.
2. They hardly qualify as games. In the vast majority of tower defense games, player interaction is harshly limited. You place towers during the between-wave intervals. Maybe you upgrade them.
That's it.
If this were any other type of game, people would be flooding the comments with "What the hell?!? That's it?!?" But because this is a type of game that somehow got the classification "genre", people have hoodwinked themselves into accepting it as "a limitation of the genre". Bull.
(I should note that I've played a rare few "hybrid" games where the player controls a character that can attack enemies in support of the towers. I like these much more than I do "pure" TD games.)
3. There's no real "strategy". Many TD games claim you can win via many different means. After the first few levels in every tower defense game I've played, this is a bald-faced lie. Most games require you to place towers and upgrade them in a rigid, exact pattern in order to clear levels, particularly if you want to complete achievements.
In the end, it comes down to repetitive trial-and-error until you find the exact arrangement the designer wants you to use to complete the level.
4. There are so damn many. It seems like every developer insists on making one of these stupid things at some point or another in their development career. No wonder they're all the same - everyone just cribs notes from everyone else.
Trust me, I've come up with plenty of reasons why:
1. The entire genre is the same game a million times. It doesn't matter what coats of paint you give the towers, how you gussy up the enemies, or what your excuse for "monsters walking down paths" is today - it's all the same in the end. "Played one, played them all" is a common complaint about many video game genres, but it especially applies here.
I swear I've played the same maps a dozen times in a dozen different games.
2. They hardly qualify as games. In the vast majority of tower defense games, player interaction is harshly limited. You place towers during the between-wave intervals. Maybe you upgrade them.
That's it.
If this were any other type of game, people would be flooding the comments with "What the hell?!? That's it?!?" But because this is a type of game that somehow got the classification "genre", people have hoodwinked themselves into accepting it as "a limitation of the genre". Bull.
(I should note that I've played a rare few "hybrid" games where the player controls a character that can attack enemies in support of the towers. I like these much more than I do "pure" TD games.)
3. There's no real "strategy". Many TD games claim you can win via many different means. After the first few levels in every tower defense game I've played, this is a bald-faced lie. Most games require you to place towers and upgrade them in a rigid, exact pattern in order to clear levels, particularly if you want to complete achievements.
In the end, it comes down to repetitive trial-and-error until you find the exact arrangement the designer wants you to use to complete the level.
4. There are so damn many. It seems like every developer insists on making one of these stupid things at some point or another in their development career. No wonder they're all the same - everyone just cribs notes from everyone else.
