Developer: 3000AD
Publisher: 3000AD
Platform: Windows, iOS, Android
Line Of Defense Tactics – Tactical Advantage – Review
Have you ever played a PC port of a mobile game? If you did, it was probably not that good. Line Of Defense Tactics is another one of those games. Line Of Defense is an action strategy game and has been on mobile stores since the 4th of February. It had over 2000 rates and had 3.5 stars. Is the pc version as good as the mobile version? No, not at all. It’s simply one of those bad ports again, but let’s get more into the game.
Story
You play as a squad of soldiers who work for GALCOM. GALCOM is what appears to be an intergalactic company of sorts. They own a couple of star bases and staging areas in the Lyrius region. They have proven to be useless and they have been abandoned. Now, the Insurgents have taken control of these bases. Your job is to go up there with your squad and kill them all.
Graphics
Graphic options in game are pretty useless, they go from “fastest” to “best”, if you want to access the “advanced” options, you have to restart the game while pressing shift, pretty stupid. Also, if you want to play the game in windowed mode, they advise you to just press alt-enter. The “advanced” graphics allow you to change resolution, change graphic settings: again from “fastest” to “best” and remap the controls.
Graphics themselves are pretty bad, they aren’t horrible, but it’s just not up to the standards of gaming nowadays. If you buy a medium priced game, you could at least expect some acceptable graphics, but this is not the case. Level design is also pretty poor, if you play this on a mobile device it might not matter that much. But bullets chasing you and hitting you behind walls is unacceptable.
Sound
The music is pretty basic, not too shabby but not spectacular either. Before each mission you get a briefing that is read for you. In game dialogues are also implemented but there is no subtitle option, which can make it annoying for some people. Speech patterns of your squad members are pretty boring though, each squad member says about the same but in a slightly different voice.
Sound effects in this game are horrible, the only sound effects there are, are the ones of gun sounds and grenade/flash bang explosions and they are horrible out of sync. The guns shoot pretty fast but the gun sounds are nowhere near in sync with the animations.
Gameplay
As this is a mobile port, you would expect some changes in controls or mechanics, big nope. No effort was put in at all to support basic right click actions. The only thing you can do with the right mouse button is hold it to turn the screen, that’s it. Everything is done with the left mouse button, it feels like 10 years ago when mouse only had 1 button. It was annoying back then, and to still have only 1 click support now feels ancient and bad.
You control your squad by clicking them, note that you can only select 1 squad member at a time, not all of them. Well, you can control all of them by pressing the corresponding squad numbers on your keyboard (1-4). Usually, you just hold down your left mouse button and drag to select everyone, but in Line Of Defense, this means moving the screen. This isn’t the only function holding the left mouse has, if you start your click on a squad member and then drag, you get a “command line”, basically indicating where you would like to move your squad member. This can get very annoying, you want to move your screen but you accidently move a squad member around.
But wait! Left click has even more functions! If you left click on a squad member, the game pauses and you can click on a location. Once you click on a location, you get a little circle menu (typical mobile design!) which shows a few options. There’s an option for moving, stealth moving, moving ALL of your squad, defending, using your special item (grenades, med kit) or cancelling. When clicking on a squad member and then on an enemy, you can attack.
The levels themselves are pretty basic, usually you’re just running around in corridors to get to your objective. The corridors are full with “defense points”, this means if you move a squad member there, they are less likely to get shot. These defense points are pretty obsolete though, you can just blast your way through the levels by attacking enemies with your whole squad and throwing a flash bang in there now and then. The objectives usually are “get squad member x to location y”, pretty boring stuff indeed.
Characters also level up while killing enemies and completing missions. These levels unlock new weapons, which you can buy before the mission. Currency can be obtained by simply playing and picking up little boxes the enemies drop, they usually contain extra experience, a revive pack or some extra cash.
Conclusion
Line Of Defense Tactics is just one of those games that might be good on mobile platforms, but oh so horrible on the PC. The game is even free on mobile (the first 3 levels), so it just looks and feels like a cheap PC port just to get some extra money out of it. If the designers would have put a little more effort into the actual PC port, this game wouldn’t be so bad, boring and dull. If you fancy buying this game, I do not recommend it. Download the demo on their website first and then you can decide if you still want to buy the game, likely not though.
Line Of Defense Tactics - Tactical Advantage - Review,
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