Defend Your Honor
Developer: Independent team of 5- see credits page
Designer: Antony Lavelle
Publisher: Armor Games
http://armorgames.com/play/12141/kingdom-rush
3.2/5 Towers (Fair)
Criteria
Style (5/5) : Cartoony with a touch of dark humor. This game is all style from the absurd storyline of retrieving the Walrus King's golden statue- who isn't really a king!- to the quirky characters that you encounter while they bury their enemies.
Waves (2/5) : A small variety of oddly shaped creatures like green spiders, one-eyed snails and even evil mists. Waves are short and to the point. You can pause anytime during waves and each wave allows you to upgrade and place Character towers before you choose to begin the next wave.
Graphics (3/5) : A nice clean layout and simple yet charming characters make Defend Your Honor surprisingly addictive.
Sound (2/5) : Those squeaks every time you click to advance the in-game 'cinematic' storyline drove me crazy and even though deliberate, the game could have easily done without such nuisances.
Music (5/5) : Original and interesting trance and anthem themed music make the little world of our gentle Elven Mage seem so much grandeur. There are only a few tracks, but for such a short game, the music is surprisingly well done.
Difficulty (3/5) : Defend Your Honor doesn't put up much of a fight. Its easy to win the first few levels with just a single tower. Even on extreme difficulty, most of your honor can be won by just buying more Characters to fight with from the shop. No gold is won for losing a level, but anyone can replay the earlier levels until you have enough gold saved over to buy more characters for each mission.
Ingenuity (1/5) : Towers are quirky characters like the lead role Elven Mage who is fighting for honor and other members who joined because their lives were just plain boring. With games like Ultimate Defense & the original Warcraft III mods, RPG-styled towers are no surprise and while amusing, the little guys just don't do much for the gameplay.
Screen Size (4/5) : With a good resolution and big and lofty 'creeps' and 'towers' you can lean back and watch your guys shoot and hack away the cute and truly creepy opposition.
Replayabilty (2/5) : With two difficulty modes: normal and extreme, and your own discretion on choosing the number of towers you will use for each mission can give the self-challenger some amusement, but again that's all this game really amounts to: a few clicks and a quick laugh at the funny story.
Bugs (5/5) : A game with no visible flaws except its lack of extra content.
TD Rating (3.2/5) : Mildly amusing and refreshing- and definitely worthy of a semi-honorable adventure even if its just for the laughs. I'd recommend this game to any TD newbie as an intro to the genre. It stands way above some of the very bland original TDs in style alone; but not in strategic elements.
Series : Just the one, but the story continues as an online board-game styled RPG that you play by reading blog posts and posting your own hilarious musings on one of the strangest online adventures I've ever seen.
http://what-do-you-do.net/
Defend Your Honor is a hilarious RPG themed TD with great music and a very funny cast of characters and a story that makes very little sense except when seen as the great parody of role-play games that it is obviously designed to be.
You play as an Elven Mage who still lives with his parents (but pays
rent to live in the basement) whose quest to gain honor- much of which
he must have lost when the guys at the local bar found out he still
lives with his parents. Your great quest leads you to the Walrus King who happened to forget his statue in his dungeon which also happens to be crawling with evil creeps for you to fight.
If you succeed in bringing back his golden statue he will give you charge of his entire army and great honor supposedly lies at the end of that journey.
Each 'stage' or room has two levels that unlock keys. Once the third
door is open, the boss mode for that stage is unlocked along with a new
strange companion... Each new character is as odd as the adventure they so happily join. Abilities are rather simplistic. Magical & melee mixed in with long and short range damage. Without giving away too much, the newest characters can slow creatures and upgrade other 'towers'.
But that's all they do, so the game's chief strategy is unit placement and with such small maps even that proves to be an easy task.
Once all the walrus statues are collected from the four unique stages that have a different look but no unique properties like ice or fire (common in most TD games) save for variably new creatures that you might just pay a little attention to as you casually advance to the next level looking for your latest fix.
Sadly, making short work of this quest is a piece of cake and the grand tale ends in a quibble of sorts.
Staying true to its genre Defend Your Honor provides you with a brief reward system.
What they did right...
Clever story and humor throughout. Characters are 'cutish' and the atmosphere blends well with the game's music. It's lighthearted; it's fun. Without over-complicating things they made a flash game worthy of the casual online gamer for the simple reason that it is exactly what you would expect from a low-budget flash game: casual fun with a great price tag-FREE!
What they did wrong...
To the serious strategy TD gamer this Defend Your Honor immediately comes off as a fart to the face. While a good deal of thought went into the game's style, nil went into gameplay mechanics. If you replaced every character and creature with circles and squares Defend Your Honor would only succeed in soliciting yawns from all quarters, not just strategy enthusiasts, but even casual players. A poor reward system, a lack of game modes, dis-interesting waves and maps that exist as little more than a stage for the action with objects as primitive as a blocky mountain serving to add variety to an otherwise bland landscape.
This game isn't one of the best TD games out there, but it is surely one of the most amusing and for that reason it deserves some of its popularity, but not all of it. I was indeed disappointed when I finished the game, and you would be too if you were looking for a mental challenge. Still, I recommend a quick playthrough for the RPG fan for whom most of these jokes are directed towards.







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