
When I wrote my last flash games post I was still of the mindset that “Tower Defense” games were lame. For those who have never heard of them, playing a Tower Defense game is similar to playing a real time strategy game (like Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires, etc) where you only build towers to defend your home base against an ever growing horde of enemy attacks. The typical Tower Defense game will have an overhead perspective and confine “attacks” to a road (usually leading to the heart of your “base” or off screen) along which you will place various towers to shoot at the “wave” of enemies (“creeps” in Tower Defense lingo). As you kill enemies you are rewarded with money to buy more towers to help combat the next wave of tougher enemies.
Now, I initially had no interest in playing these kind of games. It seemed like the only decision you made was where to put a tower and then you sat back and watched the game play itself as the towers automatically shot the enemies for you. And to be fair, there are tons of these kind of games out there, and the vast majority do just that. But I have also found the rare few that not only managed to get the difficulty curve mostly balanced (Tower Defense games are all about building enough towers to stay ahead of the toughness of the creeps–and this game balance is surprisingly hard to maintain), included interesting towers that upgraded in fun ways (the Tower Defense genre is all about slowly improving your defenses–this is a lot more fun when your defenses do progressively cooler things than just “shoot more”), and best of all, required a bit of strategy in your tower choices and placement (ie, something more than “close to the road”).
So here is my list of my favorite Tower Defense Games. The top 3 are highly recommended, 4-8 are pretty good and the last 2 are at least worth checking out if you really need more Tower Defense games. Anyway, for those that would like to waste dozens of hours of their life, read on! (more…)