Dungeon Defender

Recently, in response to my post regarding Random Defence, someone asked me what my favorite defence game is. What makes that difficult to answer is the fact that every time I think I've found a favorite, something new comes along that is even better.

Dungeon Defender is something of a cross between a tower defence type game and dungeons and dragons type game. It is one of the most complex defence games I've played, and it's fun and challenging. The game is addictive, the music trans-inducing. In short it's the kind of game I enjoy.

The downside to this game is that with the exception of the opening screen, the graphics are lousy. For all the games complexity it could benefit from better graphics. The graphics are on par with something you might expect to be running on a Commodore-64 or early Atari console game. If this were trying to emulate some classic game that would be fine, but it's not, it's a more complex derivative of tower games which are a relatively modern genre and as such it ought to have graphics to match.

Still it is highly compelling, it's a game I wasn't successful at completing in an hour which means it actually has some challenge to it, and you will probably find once you get into it, the graphics aren't that great of a handicap.

Random Defence

Random Defence is yet another horribly addictive tower defence game. Incidentally, I'm curious why the British variant of "defence" seems to be the one most of these games use. This one has numerous boards, about 51 swarms, and a number of funky defenses. The trick is not to loose lives but to do so as cheaply as possible because both your assets remaining and lives remaining figure into the final score.

Personally, I have fairly good luck at surviving with about seven missile turrets upgraded as fast as I can afford to but I never end up with a lot of money that way so my final score isn't great.

The round things to the left are research and financial centers. The blue is electrical research, the green gun research (what could be more environmentally friendly than large artillery?), the yellow is a financial center, supposedly it adds interest to your money at each level, and the red is explosives research.

You have to have a certain technology level to upgrade various weapons. That thing shooting the green beam, that's a super turret with a laser. That sucker is expensive both directly, and in that it requires all three research centers to be at certain levels for various levels before you can acquire it and to upgrade the turret; but it kills anything.


This is a screen shot of the last swarm which is referred to as "The Yard Sale", and this is also a fairly typical configuration that I use; preferring the missile turrets to other weapons systems. They are reliable defenders but they are expensive.

To play, click on the article title or the graphical icon above. Have fun!