Frontier Defence

Written by Craig Will, puffkix Wednesday, 01 June 2011 05:00

Frontier Defence, as you may have guessed by the spelling of "Defence," is not an American-developed game for the Android. Based on language options and awkward English translations it appears to be German built.

Starting the game up you will notice that there is no tutorial. If you want to learn how to play you're going to have to read the Introduction inside the Info menu. If you're reading it in English it may be hard to come away knowing exactly what to do, thanks in large part to the previously mentioned awkward English translation. It's not impossible to understand but it reads like what your elementary school sibling would write. For example, a couple lines from the intro, "Take your hero and defend your land with a couple of different tower. You have the choice. Build cannon tower, spear tower, magic tower or the legendary ultima tower." Not unintelligible, just a little... foreign.

There are 3 difficulty levels to choose from: Easy, Normal, and Heroic; and 4 maps to defend. It is not clear how many waves attack on a single map, nor is there any indication what type the next monsters will be before they start down the path. This is the part where you're glad that you have me (you'll be glad to have me a little bit later too) because I can tell you that there are 30 (or 31) waves and after completing all waves on a map the next map is unlocked.

You start the level with 140 gold, 0 crystals, and 10 lives. It plays like most other tower defense games with a couple twists: First you control a (bear?) builder with arrow keys, keep him off the path when monsters are walking there because if they touch him you lose a life and he drops all the gold you've amassed (but walking over the gold gives it back). Secondly, the most effective time to build is when the game is paused. That's right, you can move your builder around, build towers, upgrade towers, and whatever else you want to do even after you press the pause button. Speaking of the pause menu: when paused the game screen reads, "quit game?" but gives the options in German, "verlassen" and "weiterspielen." Google translator tells me that verlassen means leave while weiterspielen means play on.

Quick tangent: playing this game in German reminded me of how much fun it can be to play games in a language you don't understand. When I was a bit younger my best friend and I played an Inspector Gadget game in many different languages, including German, on the PS1 and half the time we were laughing at the other one stumbling over the words. I will always remember starting up co-op by selecting "multiplayer punkte."