Developer: Torni Games
Publisher: Torni Games
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Crystal Defense – Review
Tower Defense games were often the go-to games when playing Flash games or as the first set of mobile games on the market. The genre knows many extremely good titles, but also rubbish that you’d play once and never touch again. When technology advanced, a new genre was slapped together by adding FPS elements to the Tower Defense spiel. You could roam around, shoot the attacking forces yourself, and exact more control over the battlefield. Crystal Defense tries to mimic the gameplay of many of the greats, like Sanctum but tends to fall short in every possible aspect.
Story
There is no story to be found in Crystal Defense, which is actually quite surprising. You are playing a game, where you are defending a base or a crystal at the end of a level, for no reason at all. You have a small variety of invading forces and you don’t even know where they come from, and why they want to destroy your crystal. This game could have benefitted from a story mode or at least a certain progression system as you can simply select the final level from the get-go.
Graphics
The game looks like an unfinished project with PlayStation 2 graphics. The game looks rudimentary in every aspect, especially when taking a look at certain levels. Level 2, for example, is just white, with a few blank slates for you to build your turrets on, and that’s it. There are hardly any textures in the game, and everything simply looks like a first project, rather than a full-fledged and/or finished game. The game should be in Early Access, not only because of its graphical prowess but pretty much every aspect of the game.
Sound
The sound design is extremely bland. The backdrop is nothing memorable and more than often it’s not even noticeable. We are quite happy that there is no annoying track on the background, but something to get your blood flowing would have been nice. The turrets make very generic sounds, just like your weapon and the enemies’ attacks. Again, this feels like a first attempt at making a game, rather than something that should be sold at this point.
Gameplay
Crystal Defense is a mix between a traditional Tower Defense game and a First-Person Shooter. Overall things are simple. You pick a map, you start building towers and you let the waves come in. You dispose of enemies with your weapon and you try to get some damage done by the turrets as well. The game has one weapon, five turrets, and six maps and that’s about it. You can save up experience for some passive upgrades, which would help you get through the same few maps, which isn’t really an incentive to keep playing.
The game’s biggest problems aren’t the graphics, the lack of a story or the somewhat bland sound design, but the lack of content and the game’s mechanics. You can build a few towers in-between waves, but the sheer limited availability of the towers makes the game monotonous and the upgrades of said towers have a limited impact. More than often you’ll be the one gunning down most of the enemies, but sadly you only have one, extremely boring, weapon. There is nothing more to the game than this.
Overall the controls feel responsive, but having to script only one weapon, where its alternate fire feels like shit, shouldn’t be that much of a challenge. As mentioned before, you have no other weapons available, and you can only do a few passive upgrades for your rate of fire and so on. Sadly, clearing a level gives you that little experience, that you’ll be grinding the same levels over and over again in order to buy an upgrade, to meaningless grind the same levels again after that. The game feels like a basement concoction at the moment and should actually either be a free-to-play game or an Early Access project that needs a whole lot of tweaking.
Conclusion
In good conscience, we can’t give Crystal Defense a passing grade. The game screams Early Access or prototype from start to finish. There are a few good ideas thrown around here and there, but there’s nothing other games haven’t done before, and they have done so a lot better. The graphics feel subpar, the sound design is bland, the lack of story is a missed opportunity, the mechanics are too simplistic and the game has no variety when it comes to its content. We advise you to skip this one for the time being, but as this is not an Early Access project, there’s a good chance that there won’t be any major updates on the horizon.
Crystal Defense - Review,
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