I’ll be honest here, the first several levels of the tower defense game, 4 Towers: Episode 2 “Evolution”, on the iPhone didn’t really impress me, what with fixed tower placement and seemingly low level number of tower types. The game however started to open up and I’m actually thankful that I played on over the weekend. It turns out that the fixed tower placement allowed for one thing: pairing of the 4 basic tower types with one another to create even more powerful towers.

Players are given four basic tower types, the first one specialising in damage per second (DPS), the second one slows creeps, the third delivers splash damage, and the fourth, amplifies the damage received by the targeted creep. Mixing these towers up into pairs will create long range laser towers, freeze towers, super fast firing towers and even area effect pulse towers that deliver damage to anything within the area. Any combination will have a positive effect but whether you should use a particular pairing at a particular location will be determined mainly by what kind of creeps you are facing.

I was really impressed at this juncture at how the later levels are designed to leverage on pairing towers together. Some allow for quite a number of pairings to happen, and at least one level will have you handicapped at just one pairing, making it necessary to change tower pairings on the fly depending on the creep that approaches. This makes for an exciting gameplay experience IMHO.  The game’s graphics style is somewhat similar to that of GeoDefense but minus the flashy particle effects. The soundtrack is serviceable but really now, the main reason you are gonna get into the game is the gameplay.

Each level has three difficulty modes. As far as I can see, changing the difficult mode determines how much gold you start with. The gold is used to purchase new towers and also to upgrade towers. The difficulty mode also has a direct relation to whether you’ll get swamped in the early mid game. LOL.

Besides the unique tower pairing system, 4Towers is the first time I see a game go on social gaming overkill. This game has BOTH OpenFeint and Game Center support which gets a little weird sometimes in terms of presentation. I’m a Game Center guy so to the developers of 4Towers spare the unnecessary overload here and choose one! On the plus side, the devs are releasing episodic content from time to time. The current update brings Episode 2, with a whole bunch of new levels to play in and as far as I can tell, this episodic content is free!

4Towers is probably one of the better iPhone games that I’ve played in the past couple of months, and it’s just shows that one shouldn’t judge a game by its initial levels, one just needs to dig in a little deeper. Check out the game over here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/4towers-episode-2-evolution/id366758940?mt=8. Highly Recommended!