I never really have written a review of Tower Defense, a homebrew adaptation of the popular Warcraft III mod, for the Nintendo DS, despite it being one of my favourite homebrew games. I intend to make up for that and so here goes.
For those who are not familiar with the Warcraft III version of Tower Defense, it’s basically involves stopping waves of creatures (creeps) moving from Point A to Point B of an obstacle/maze-like map. Stopping creeps involves building and upgrading towers that will slow them down, deal damage and act as buffs for other towers.
The Nintendo DS version of Tower Defense is somewhat similar to the PC counterpart whereby it has this Warcraft 3 theme going on. Players start by selecting a map and the actual game begins with all the action taking place on the bottom screen. The top screen is used to show build options, wave stats, the amount of gold earned, and not forgetting tower stats.
In order to access the build options, players will need to “switch screens” by pressing either trigger button. This will cause the top screen to swap with the bottom screen and players will be able to access the build options (and everything else) using the stylus.
Gold is awarded by killing creeps and is required for building and upgrading towers. Since players can only place a certain number of towers, positioning, upgrading and selling of towers is a necessary form of micro-management, a term Warcraft III was rather well known for.
Tower Defense for the Nintendo DS manages to port over the strategic depth and fun gameplay of its more illustrious PC counterpart and while the PC version emphasizes on multiplayer teamwork, the DS version is pretty much a single player game for now. Graphics wise, it’s pretty, in a DS way and you gotta love the sound effects 🙂
You can get this excellent homebrew game at the developer’s website over at https://ndswtd.wordpress.com. If you have a slightly older version of the game and you cannot get it to run on your flashcart such as the R4, it probably needs patching; please refer to my patching guide over here.
