I’m a veteran of the tower-defense genre. And by that, I mean that I played a lot of Bloons TD5 with my girlfriend. We rocked. So I was looking forward to what Aegis of Earth could bring to the table.
The answer? Quite a lot, actually.
Now, let’s get the negative out of the way: the story, dialog and voice acting are sub-par. Don’t get me wrong, for the genre, they’re all quite good. But the game has enough going for it that a bit of a stronger delivery on these fronts could have made a huge difference in the end result and polish.
Everything else, though, is pretty much spot-on.
You command a city with rotational areas, in which you must construct weaponry to defend your domain, and residences to house your citizens. While the premise might sound simple, there’s enough intricacies in the mechanics of the game that it really becomes an immersive, enjoyable and challenging experience.
Soon.
I can’t go into every detail of the gameplay, and you don’t want me to, as that’s the whole reason for the game to exist. But suffice to say, you spend most of your time in two phases: planning and combat.
During planning, you research new weapons (eventually, this isn’t available from the get-go), build them and housing, collect taxes (hooray!), synthesize new materials to fortify your units, and recruit new party members (or operatives).
During combat, you’ll be spinning the 4 concentric circles that make up your city in order to defeat attacks from hordes of enemies. You have long-range weapons to solve the issue from afar, and close-combat weapons as a last-defense type of deal.
Combat really is the core of the game, and it’s executed flawlessly. I had a blast (ha!) right from the start, as the combat is quite frantic even on the first mission. You soon get used to rotating the city at will in order to protect it, and you start developing strategies for unit placement (close-range missiles to protect housing, etc).
Aesthetically, the game is nothing to write home about. Actually, aside from the characters, the game looks a bit bland. But it runs a lot smoother than some games that look awesome on screenshots and run like a one-legged dog (I’m looking at you, Borderlands 2).
As I mentioned before, the voice acting is below par, but I think it has more to do with the poor script than bad acting. Sounds and music aren’t great either, but they do the job.
All in all, Aegis of Earth is a pleasant twist on a familiar genre: You spin your base around, you defend citizens. There’s plenty to upgrade and merge, and there’s plenty of enemies to kill.
Aesthetically, the game will not blow you away. But the core gameplay and sheer fun factor will keep you coming back for more time and time again.
It did me.
- Title: Aegis of Earth: Protonovus Assault
- Publisher: Aksys Games
- Developer: Acquire Corp
- Format: PSN Download
- Memory Card Space Needed: 748mb
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