For a genre that's been around since 1990, the Tower Defense style of strategy gaming has taken its time to hit the public conscious. The last few years though, mostly thanks to Flash-based versions online, have seen the genre catch the imagination and become a competitive sub-genre in itself. And now Digital Chocolate are bringing that style to Symbian with Dictator Defense, now available in the Ovi Store.
Digital Chocolate are no stranger to Symbian, having made some strong appearances on the N-Gage platform with their “Cafe” series of casual games, but Dictator Defense is another level of gameplay ahead of those. This is a title that has been tailored to a mobile device to provide a mix of quick gameplay (5-10 minutes per level) as well as recognising the limits of a small screen device.
The goal of any Defense game is to protect your camp, which in Dictator is found at the bottom of the screen. There is a wall between the camp and where you can start to deploy troops, and further up the screen, perhaps far enough away that you need to scroll the screen, is another wall. Beyond that wall (there be dragons? - Ed) is where the enemy are based. As each level starts, the enemy will start a slow march from the top of the screen towards you. Your goal, as the leader of your camp, is to make sure they do not breach the wall surrounding your camp.
To help you populate the naked battlefield, you can call on a variety of troops, traps and resource generators to build. These are introduced over the first few levels, building up your inventory with potential soldiers, banks, trenches, dynamite and other useful tools for combat. I say potential because each unit has a cost in gold that you need to pay to create it. You start with a very small amount of gold, enough to build maybe two units – so one of them is going to have to be a bank. These produce gold on an ongoing basis, allowing you to bolster your troops and equipment.
Like any strategy game there's the balance of resources (gold), production (once built, a certain amount of time has to pass before a similar unit can be built) and defending against the oncoming army and the relentless passing of time waiting for everything to recharge. If you can get a balance in these elements, then you have yourself a good game.
Digital Chocolate found that balance.
What they have also found is a way to take a complicated strategy game and boil it down to a mobile device and your specific circumstances. Tower Defense games can be huge and sprawling, with tiny pixelized characters attacking from all angles, forcing you to squint or scroll, depending on the designer. Not here. Digital Chocolate have kept the graphics large and cartoon like, making it easy to see what's going on. Couple this with changing the “maze” aspect you sometimes see with five vertical 'routes' down the screen to defend and the mobile version continues to offer strategy choices on a limited playing field – perfect for a portable screen.
I also want to draw attention to the presentation, with nice spot graphics in the game, good use of icons and logos (and colour) in the menu, a musical track that's almost (but not quite) Dixieland, and a sneaky suspicion that the enemy portrayed by a Texan with a huge hat might once have been mistaken for the occupant of the White House and you have a game that has quality and which moves along at a good pace... And all of this is in Java to boot!
Dictator Defense captures the spirit of the strategy game perfectly, and even though it jettisons many of the conventions of the genre, it retains enough to make a good mobile game that you want to keep on playing. It's definitely recommended – and part of me wonders what they could manage if they did a dedicated Symbian version from the ground up, rather than a tweaked 'one size fits all' Java version.
-- Ewan Spence, Feb 2010.