The next game I’ve completed this year is a phone title. In this case I decided maxing out the levels was how I would declare it completed as there isn’t actually anything plot wise to speak of.
The game is for Windows Phone 7, and has two unique selling points. The first is that it unlocks items in the Deluge multiplayer DLC for Crackdown 2 on 360, but that’s not really the interesting one. What makes the game interesting is that it is played over a real world map.
When you start the tutorial is the Microsoft campus in Seattle. A central base exists and you build guns within the control radius in order fight back a never ending onslaught of freaks and cell enemies (the bad guys from Crackdown 2). Technically the game is a tower defence game, but without most of the skill and planning that implies as although the enemies do travel along the roads roads you don’t really need to think too much about tower placement and can get away with just an intelligent placement of your base and having the right guns in the right place. Putting your base at the end of a long road and a laser that can fire down that road means that not much will get to your base from the rank and file, and only special mission targets will be a worry.
These missions trigger every so often and will either be to kill something or defend it so that it can reach your base. In return you get cash, XP and items that are needed in order to purchase upgrades to your base and weapons. Individual targets for these missions can be manually targeted so that one or more guns will hammer them, and while nothing is targeted the guns automatically fire at any nearby enemies.
After your bases have reached a high enough level you can activate project sunburst, which allows you to link three bases across the globe together and kill kill enemies within that triangle. This nets you cash and lots of XP, which really makes levelling up become so easy as to be trivial by the end.
You can assign people to your guns (which means nothing as far as I can tell) and so some fiddling around in your friends’ bases, but this seems totally pointless. I don’t know what else I can say about this feature as the only point I could see for it was to get an achievement. There’s no actual interaction with other players, you just get to see that your friends have played this game.In fact the main friends list is hidden away on the UI so that I think many players just aren’t going to see it.
The problem with the game is that there isn’t more to it than that. It doesn’t get more difficult and it doesn’t require you to adapt to situations. In fact when going for the final achievement I just had to set my guns targeting a point and leave the phone connected to power for a day while I played other games on other systems. I’m still not sure why I decided the last achievement was worth getting actually. There’s just nothing there beyond the gimmick of playing on a real world satellite map, and that gets old very quickly. After you have gotten a couple of bases up to level 3 and fired your first sunburst you have seen everything. It seems like a waste to me, the scope for the idea is great but it seems like they only implemented the first pass of ideas. If you play the free trial of the game you will get an idea as to what it’s about and see most of the content in fact.
I’m not sure if it was Crackdown nostalgia, but something about the game did make me get max level and get all the achievements, including the one that needed me to kill a quarter of a million enemies with a gun (target a laser at a point down the road, go play PS3). The sounds of the XP coming in is taken from the 360 games and that may be it, but I’m not sure. All I know is that I’m unlikely to ever play this game again and I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.
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