OTTTD – Review
A game titled OTTTD is bound to get your interest. What does it even mean, you think? Well, let me enlighten you. OTTTD is short for Over The Top Tower Defense and I couldn’t describe this game better even if I wanted to.
Story
We find ourselves in the far away future, in the year 2136 to be exact. HEROCORP is one of the biggest military forces in the universe and it has the basic goal of protecting Earth against alien invasions. You do this, not by defending Earth itself, but by traveling the universe and wiping out all signs of alien life you encounter. Sounds a bit cruel? Oh boy, you have no idea…
The story is basically there just to give you a reason whatsoever for wiping out all kinds of alien races. If you’re a bit of a pacifist, you might look elsewhere for some entertainment.
Graphics
Graphic wise, OTTTD has certainly some good stuff to offer. The planets you visit are detailed and make use of some nice contrastive colors. Sometimes a ‘world’ will be all happy and cheerful, other times; the assignment takes place in, for example, a dark forest full of zombies. BUT, the thing that really makes OTTTD stand out as a tower defense game is that body parts and ammo stay where they fall. If you blow up some enemies, you’ll see body flying all over the place and they don’t disappear! They are all visible on screen and like this, soon enough, you’ll be watching at an incredibly bloody battlefield, machine gun shells and blood/bones at every inch of the screen.
This is a really cool feature and besides the obvious fun factor, it’s quite practical to be able to see how far those little alien buggers reach before being blasted apart. Like this, the player can easily anticipate and adapt their towers for better protection.
Sound
OTTTD has some cool beats playing in the background. They never really tend to get annoying or repetitive and they give a nice vibe to the overall atmosphere. The best way I could describe music in this game is that it makes everything a lot more ‘badass’, if that makes any sense.
Sound effects are nothing overly special but they get the job done. What’s fun to notice is that every character has their own specific way of talking. My Assault guy (he’s called Knuckles Jenkins, yey for the random name generator!) sounds like the evolution from apes to humans has been a bit delayed in his case. It often puts a smile on my face when I hear him say “I’m hungry” or “I came here to kick ass and chew gum and I’m running low on gum” and things like that.
Gameplay
If you’re familiar with tower defense games, you won’t have any problems with OTTTD. For newcomers too, this title shouldn’t prove too difficult to master. The idea is quite simple: a lot of little, big and uhm, HUGE aliens will approach your Head Quarters and it’s up to you to prevent them from destroying it. The best way to protect your base from attacks is to set up a nice wall of towers. Each tower has its own benefits and it’s smart to keep the situations in mind where one tower proves a lot more useful than another. As aliens are brutally executed, you’ll earn points which can be invested in the towers to make them even stronger. Doing this is absolutely necessary. A lot of levels have a boss type of enemy at the end and they can take a LOT of damage. If you’ve neglected your towers, don’t come crying!
Not only towers are upgradeable. As you complete levels and earn stars (up to 3 if you complete a level without taking too much HQ damage), you’ll earn money to spend on new weapons and armor for your crew. In the beginning, there’s just one soldier available but after a while you should be able to choose your own preferred squad. Depending on what class a character is, he will possess certain abilities that can be used in a level. For example: the Engineer can boost towers so they do a lot more damage for a specific time, the Rocketeer is the proud owner of a jetpack and the Recon can cloak himself so he’s invisible for enemy troops. Soon enough, you’ll earn skill points to upgrade each ability to your liking. Together with tower upgrades, those skills are very much needed, especially further on in the game where the real challenge begins.
Unfortunately, a lot of decent equipment cost a lot of money to unlock. It’ll take quite a while to buy certain awesome looking and protective armor vests and in combination with the next thing I’m going to mention, this game might not appeal to everyone.
Okay so the point is that OTTTD can become quite grindy, even early on in the game. The first 7 levels are not so much of a challenge and very doable. Then suddenly, along comes level 8 and that’s where I was ‘stuck’ for quite a while. Maybe this happened because of my lack of competence you say? Well, I can assure you that I do know how to play these kind of games as they’re one of my favorites to play but whatever I tried to do, whatever combination of towers I used, I kept on losing in that particular level. So there was nothing else to do than replaying previous levels and upgrade my skills and equipment even further. Eventually, you’ll pass every level but it might take some grinding before you get there. Folks who hate redoing things will probably get a bit annoyed with this game for that reason. Personally, I had so much fun with this title that it didn’t bother me in the slightest.
Some other things I’d love to see added in the game is the possibility to select more than just one of your soldiers at a time. Now you can only select one and tell him where to go but sometimes, in the heat of battle, you might want to get all the power you have to one spot. It’s a bit cumbersome to have to pick one character at a time at those moments. Moving the screen by touching the borders with your mouse would be a welcome addition as well. Now you have to click and drag which once again, is sometimes not the most practical thing to do.
However, besides those minor remarks, OTTTD plays incredibly smooth and it will get you addicted in no time. This is great example of one of those games where you decide to play just ‘one more round and then go to sleep’. We both know that won’t happen eventually.
Conclusion
OTTTD is a blast to play and it’s bound to keep you busy for a long time. It might get grindy after a while but replaying older levels is almost as much fun as trying the new ones. Plus, you get to see the nasty consequences of your actions as all remaining body pieces are scattered across the map. And yes, that is as disturbing and awesome as it sounds.
OTTTD - Review,
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