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Good morning everyone!A strategy game takes the spotlight today, transforming you into the role of a brave hero who must save the ‘Ancient Kingdom’ from a plethora of baddies. As the hero, you must protect your castle and the people within from being captured. So are you up to it? 
As added protection you build beautiful towers and swiftly cast spells. As expected, you also get bonuses for each kill, (how mercenary! and then another one at the end of each attack.
Developer: Voodoo Dimention
Supported Languages: English; German; Russian.
System Requirements: Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP,
Additional Requirements: 3D video card; Pentium 500MHz; 128MB RAM,
Tested on: Windows XP Pro.
By building towers and upgrading the older ones, you’ll increase your range, fire speed and fire power. The monsters change also, hopefully to keep your interest high. The locations also vary as you progress in the game.
So let’s get to it shall we?
Settings:
The opening screen, has a shadowed castle in the background with several choices to the right, as this image clearly shows here. Placing my mouse over ’settings’, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the effect and the animation that had been applied for mouse-overs. I took this as a (hopeful!) promise of even better graphics and effects to come.
As you can see here, the settings screen allows you to:
- Enter your name;
- Change volumes for both music and sound, to your preference, with the sliders;
- Choose your resolution, (mine will be at 1280×1024 as I have a large screen;)
- Choose whether or not you want to use VSync;
- Play in window or full screen mode;
- Change your Gamma;
- Choose whether or not you want to use 16 or 32bit color.
With a really comprehensive range of settings, the player gains more control of the game.
Time to play!
Clicking on ‘Play Game,’ gives the player two more options: New Game or Continue Game. To the avid gamer, this would normally mean that the game can be saved anywhere mid-game. However in Master of Defense, you can only save the game between attacks, otherwise the game is lost. This actually argues against the online documentation which states:
“Master Of Defense allows you to save your game at any time and return to it later.”
If this is really important to you, I suggest you check with Voodoo Dimention support, to see which statement holds true. It’s always a distinct irritation for me (and to others, I’m sure,) when the developer decides to omit this feature.
Clicking on ‘New Game,’ brings you to another screen which shows the player his entire Kingdom, with a few labeled places.
Tutorial:
The game launches straight into a tutorial – which I find is always a great idea for games, instead of having to wade through a help file.
For some unknown reason, I found the font in the tutorial to be odd for the theme of the game. I’d have preferred to see a more medieval font; even perhaps something like Kristen ITC or Viner Hand ITC., which although not medieval, would fit the theme better.
A few spelling errors need to be addressed.
Playing Field:
You begin with $200 in gold; and 100 people resident in your castle. Displayed along the bottom, are the items which you can buy to upgrade your castle. Each tower allows you to attack in a different direction and upgrading them will give you a greater radius for firing and causes differing amounts of damage and has differing amounts of attack speeds.
At the top right hand corner, there is a large lower case “e” below your gold. This denotes the experience you have gained. The more experience you gain, the more you can repair your castles from prior raids and attacks.
Game Play:
The first thing that one needs to know, is that you receive more gold at the end of the attack, (round) depending upon how many monsters you destroy. However, this amount decreases with the loss of people in your castle.
If you lose all your people, the game is over. There are 15 different raids during an ‘attack.’
It’s also important to remember the advice in the tutorial, that tells us it’s far better to build one castle at a time and upgrade it, than to have a few smaller castles.
You can also sell your towers if you want, however, you will only receive 75% of the original tower cost. Interestingly, you can also slow down or speed up the time.
I didn’t even manage to get past the first round on my first try! When I actually began to play, I realized that the game wasn’t just a click and shoot game.
However, in my own defense, I didn’t expect some of the monsters to be shadows and didn’t they were anything to shoot at. Armed with a little more knowledge about the strategy I needed, I began another game – and this time I survived all 15 raids and also had 3 fully upgraded castles.
At the end of each attack, you check your skills screen. Here you’ll see exactly what they are and how many experience points you have, with which to upgrade them. Mousing over the plus sign to the right of each experience entry, will tell you what it is, while a black pop-up box appears to the left, telling you how it works.
There is so much more to learn as you go along in this game, that I’m still not sure what lies ahead.
Graphics:
I was pretty disappointed after my earlier expectations, While animation remained smooth, I felt that the monsters lacked imagination – however, perhaps this will change in the higher levels that I haven’t played yet.
The background graphics are truly excellent. I found that I had to lighten my screen and increase the contrast, to truly appreciate them though.
Help File:
There isn’t one! However the tutorial does teach you at a comfortable rate. I actually found some help in error, by unknowingly clicking a link to the tutorial, that you can access during the game. It’s a teal colored, rippled graphic at the top of the screen, where I also found the save link a la` Windows.
Don’t forget to check the Tips & Tricks page on their web site, to help you on your journey.
Music:
The music is definitely appropriate to the theme and pleasant on the ears. The majestic music reminded me of Richard the Lionheart riding home to his own castle after the Crusade Wars, with scores of armored soldiers behind him.
Features:
- 6 different locations to explore;
- Survival mode;
- 180 raids of evil monsters;
- 4 different towers, fires and balloons;
- 3 Magic types;
- Towers and other skill upgrades;
- List your high scores on the internet.
Negatives:
- Unable to see your high scores within the game – only on the internet;
- The internal help link while you’re playing, needs to be made clearer to the player.
Points:
Originality: 7/10
Functionality: 8/10
Intuitiveness: 5/10
Fun Factor: 7/10
Price: US$19.99
Summary:
Unfortunately, this definitely wasn’t the heart-stopping game that I thought it might have been, then again I don’t see any false statements on the developer’s web site claiming that it would be.
I did enjoy playing the game, but I only played for an hour or so. Because of its simplicity, I already know that it’s not going to be the first game I’m going to choose in my game gallery, each time I reach for one.
Recommendation:
I’d like to have seen a feature to play over the LAN against someone else in your home. Since so many people are setting up networks in their homes these days, because of kids’ needs, (homework; research; games; etc.,) that many of the game developers are including this feature in their programming.
While the game does permit you to pan from one side to the other, I’d also like to have had the ability to change the perspective (to rise higher or fall lower,) on-the-fly, while fighting the ‘baddies.’
With as far as I’ve gone in the game, it could easily be played and enjoyed by children as young as 8 or 9 to adult. When I play Masters of Defense again, I’ll add a note here if that fact changes.
I hope everyone is enjoying their weekend, either playing games or being out and about enjoying the fresh air! So till next time ….
~ Swan
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“The day will come when machines and software will tell us whom to know; what to eat; what to wear; when to go to work and what profession to pursue; when to sleep; what entertainments to enjoy and with whom to have any kind of relationship. It can’t be avoided and you will succumb.”
~ Swan (2005)
