Digital Kaleidoscope

Desktop Tower Defense: Jumping the Shark?

Topic: Gaming 1 year, 5 months ago Share on Facebook

Version 1.5 of Desktop Tower Defense, the great productivity-destroying Flash game, has finally been released! I love the game and have lost way too much time to it recently. (My high scores are 7024 on Normal and 4269 on Hard.) Unfortunately, the new version isn’t that great.

Note the new sponsored creep enemies in the new version (enlarge)

There’s a new Ink Tower that you can build and a new form of enemy: the dark creep. Since DTD is a game where good players have well-tested, carefully-planned strategies and every second counts, players will have to learn to play to game all over again. This isn’t necessarily a problem, except that the new changes to the game seem rather superficial and not a great deal of fun, so it doesn’t seem worthwhile to relearn it again.

Oh and guess what? There’s a lot more in-game advertising. A lot more. In fact, some of the creep bear the sponsor’s letter ‘K’ logo, which is really annoying and I think just goes too far. The slightly improved graphics certainly don’t make up for it, and the new sounds seem rather too cheesy.

I’m worried Desktop Tower Defense may have just jumped the shark.

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