Defend Your Castle

The original defense game

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

Not only was Defend Your Castle the first of its kind, it created its own flash genre known as ‘defense’ games. No one cared about the mediocre graphics and sound. Defend your castle was new, different, and fun.

In DFC you must protect your castle walls from an onslaught of barbarians. To kill one you simply grab it with your mouse and fling it up into the air. Throw it high enough and it will disintegrate into the ground in an explosion of blood. Otherwise it will land on the ground, get up, and proceed towards your castle again. When barbarians reach your castle they start attacking and draining your castle HP. The game is segmented into rounds, with each round adding stronger, more frequent, and faster enemies. In between rounds you have the choice to buy various upgrades for your castle. You can repair the walls and fortify them. You can buy a temple, from which then you can convert enemy soldiers to archers, wizards, repair men, or kamikaze soldiers. It is this feature that adds a lot of depth to the gameplay. Once you purchase the temple you can slowly accumulate converted soldiers, but then it is up to you on how you want to distribute them. Build an army of archers to kill enemies for you? Save up kamikaze soldiers for rough times? Let a group of repairmen keep rebuilding your wall as you play? Each type of unit expends upkeep costs and will die out after so many rounds. There’s a lot to keep you on your toes here.

Graphics and sound are pretty average, but it’s clear that the focus of this game was the interactivity and strategy. The sound effects that the men make when they crush into the ground are extremely satisfying. Maybe some basic shading here and there would have made the game a little prettier, but it’s not really a concern. The game also has a save feature which is nice, so you can revert back if you play a level badly or get interrupted while playing. You can also use it to take a break from throwing stick men. As you progress through the levels the amount of stickmen you’ll be flinging will increase pretty steadily. The difficulty increase is laid out nicely, but you might find yourself in some dead end spots sometimes. One round a majority of your archer team might be used up, and if you don’t have many converts stored, then your wall is going to take a hurting.

Defend your castle has many imitators (I couldn’t resist making my own defense game either) but all of them are extensions or modifications of DFC’s original formula. This game is a must play.

Click here to play Defend Your Castle






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