Avast! A horde o’ buccanneer dogs be comin’ t’ pillage yer tranquil village …o’ pirates. Or t’ steal yer ships. Or be it t’ get away on the’r own ships? Whatere the reason, ye’d best be killin’ them or ’tis Davy Jones’ locker fer ye!
No, I really can’t sustain that dialect for the entire review. It would drive me mad.
Horn Swaggle Islands is a pirate themed Tower Defense game. Be a pirate commander deploying pirate defenses in tropical pirate locations against pirates. Pirate! Maybe it’s a touch odd from a story perspective, but who cares about motivation when the game is good? And who doesn’t like a pirate theme regardless? Nobody sane, that’s who!
The learning curve on the Islands is steep. In fact, if you can get any impression from the Trial other than “it’s a tower defense game”, it would have to be “it’s a monkey-loving HARD tower defense game”. The guys at Pencel Games must have realized this, so they provided us with the full game to have a go at. I played the second island (the first is a very basic tutorial) in my spare time for two days before I survived the 8th wave of attackers. I played for two more before I could survive the 18th wave. There are 44.
Why is the learning curve so steep? One reason is because the depth of strategy in Horn Swaggle Islands is a bit greater than and in a different ballpark from a typical Tower Defense game. Go ahead and build a string of the cheap guns for the first wave. Then gasp in disbelief as the weakest enemies you’ll face prance by en masse, without even enough casualties to dampen their spirits. The path you create matters. Support units matter. Upgrades, in the proper context, matter. Tallying kills with upgraded towers matters!
The other reason the learning curve is so steep is that the difficulty curve is nearly non-existent. Each island I’ve seen pits you against the same 44 waves of the same pirates in the same order. Once I had a strategy to defeat the first island, I crushed the next five in short order. The difference between the islands is mainly just the layout. The variations in building and pathing areas are likely intended to require modifications to your strategy, but I’ve been able to deploy essentially the same gauntlet even on the most restrictive maps. A couple times it got slightly tense financially, as you’ll need to wall in the invaders’ roaming, but the lynchpin went into place just before tougher waves arrived. Perhaps it is more of a factor on the hardest difficulty setting.
Some of the islands also feature treasures which you can collect if you can make the enemy walk over them. As the contents of the treasures are mostly only useful at the beginning of the level, you’ll have to walk a thin line between letting the invaders survive far enough to get to the treasure spot, and killing them before they get to the end. None that I’ve seen will alter the course of gameplay enough that they can’t safely be ignored, though, if you can fight the urge to collect them.
The game has some minor issues – the controls are a bit fiddly and not well explained (particularly for the Hold – it’s LIFO and you’ll need to have base towers down already to move a unit out), the graphics are small enough to cause issues on SDTVs, and there’s no indicator of what you’ll be facing in the upcoming attack wave – but none affect the gameplay much. It’s only the utter non-variance in attacks that causes the game to suffer a bit.
So, why the recommendation? Because despite the previous paragraph, the game is rather fun. Plus, it requires thought, attention, and near-constant action on your part to triumph. If you like strategy in your Tower Defense, this game you won’t want to miss.
This title was 400 Points at the time of writing this review but has since been reduced to 240 Points.
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This game is unplayable on my SD tv. Like many other Indie Games.
The text is a bit small so I can see where it would be bad on an SD TV. Which is a shame because it is a lot of fun.
I am surprised that wasn’t highlighted in reviews/testing. It’s a shame. Solid game though – I am glad that I am not the only one who struggled with the learning curve, lol.