Games Thursday : Mars Tower Defense
Mars TD is a grim 8 bit preview of the future when we establish a colony on the red planet. If you thought the octopi-like Martians of Metal Slug 2 were the creations of wildly imaginative (or possibly insane) game designers, you’re absolutely wrong – Mars TD designer Taro knows farbetter that they are real and dangerous lifeforms native to Mars and they eat human colonies there for breakfast.
Walking octopi from Metal Slug aside, Mars does have a variety of weird fauna from spinning heads that eerily resemble Crash Bandicoot’s and even the catlike Qoo from the similarly named range of drinks from Cola-Cola.
These hostile Martians will appear and attempt to ravage the colony unless we humans start building towers to defend ourselves – that’s right, it’s another tower defense game again but Mars TD has a couple of neat gimmicks that sets it apart from other games of the genre.
The attributes of each tower from top to bottom : Level, Exp, Attack Strength, Attack Speed and Unknown (sorry!). The buttons from top to bottom are : Upgrade, Move and Sell
When a tower blows an alien to bits, it gains both experience and credits – I guess it’s probably the gunners in it who gain experience since the concept of inanimate towers gaining exp on their own is rather freaky 
With sufficient experience, towers will automatically level up on their own. Towers with more experience are also cheaper to upgrade than untrained towers – especially the more advanced towers (I have seen a total of five different types as of writing)
Towers with yellow, orange and red arrows are progressively cheaper to upgrade
There’s also an ability to switch the positions of towers which is free between stages but will cost you when you move them around during each stage. Walls can be built if you need to move a tower to an unoccupied spot, which is a handy tactic when you have insufficient credits to build actual towers but want to implement a more in-depth defensive strategy by shifting them around.
At the end of the day, it’s still tower defense but it’s tactically challenging (read : super hard) and addictive as hell. The 8 bit feel is a plus in my book too – huge pixels, garish colours, bleepy soundtrack and outlandish critters complete the surrealistic effect Mars TD has on the senses.
Play Mars TD at mogera.jp. (there’s also a review at JayIsGames where I saw this).
MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
More Tower Defense Flash Games : Onslaught 2 & VectorTD
Retro Tactical Warfare in Nectaris for Windows
OpenTyrian – The Best DOS Shoot’em Up – Now for Windows XP/Vista and Other OSes
The Last Stand & The Endless Zombie Rampage & Crimsonland
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