geoDefense Review

Critical Thought Games' geoDefense takes many of the tower defense genre's conventions, turns them upside down, and shakes the hell out of them. What comes out? Millions of bright neon sparks and a good-sized dose of fun, especially for 99 cents.

Most tower defense games fall firmly into the strategy category. You note what's next heading down the path, make subtle adjustments to your defenses, and settle down to watch what happens. There's usually plenty of time to get everything done; reflexes don't really factor into the equation.

It's July 4th in Creeptown.

geoDefense, on the other hand, is much more action-oriented, almost like an arcade game in tower defense guise. It starts with the Geometry Wars-inspired graphics. The creeps are hyper-colorful shapes moving through a grid. There is eye candy aplenty as they pop like fireworks, sending bouquets of energy flying and rippling through the background.

The gameplay matches this high-energy presentation, too. The game's 30 levels are split into Easy, Medium and Hard tiers of 10 levels each. The Easy levels are fairly sedate, but things start to get hairy immediately on Medium. The level designs do a good job of switching things up on you, both in terms of layout and win conditions.

However, as we moved further into geoDefense, the game skewed decisively towards the action side of the spectrum. Waves of creeps piled up on top of one another, causing our bankroll to shoot through the roof and removing any need to allocate resources carefully. On many of the levels, it was all we could do to spend it faster than it came in!

At this point, the game turned into a bit of a spamfest. We were able to progress by laying down as many towers as we could fit onto the map and upgrading constantly. It was still a tactical exercise to some extent, but it no longer played much like tower defense -- there were so many sparks and explosions we couldn't even see what was going on half the time.

But geoDefense is still a refreshing, enjoyable game, regardless of what you call it. It moves fast, it looks great, and there's a lot of content here for a buck. We recommend it.