Scribble Defense follows the traditional Tower Defense format; enemies travel along pathways and you must place towers containing weapons to stop them in their tracks before they reach the end. In Scribble Defense, you play the part of the Scribble Meister who must protect the Scribbles from the evil Scrawls.
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There are 21 levels separated over Easy, Medium and Hard difficulties. Several towers are available to place and are introduced throughout the game. Towers include the usual standard styles such as a shooters, snipers, flame throwers and the ever useful slow downs. Towers can not be upgraded but you can place them any where on the screen. Keeping your cursor near to towers will allow your cursor to fire at enemies providing some extra firepower to keep those Scrawls at bay.
The final two towers are the most interesting, they allow you to alter the location of the pathways and temporarily affect enemy movement. The ‘Push’ tower sucks the pathways and enemies into the area of the tower, the ‘Pull’ tower will do the opposite. These two towers add a new dimension to the genre and it does make up for the lack of upgradeable towers. With some practice you will be able to totally change the layout of the paths which is essential in the later levels of the game.
The Push and Pull towers are a great idea and bring something new to the Tower Defense genre. In some ways it adds a puzzle element to the game, when you first start a level you will add in this factor to your tower placement strategy. Moving the pathways can be very beneficial not only to save cash but to be more efficient with your towers.
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A level before and after using the Push and Pull Towers
Presentation is done well, menus are well designed and easy to navigate and information in game is clearly presented. I would have liked to have seen some information on what the towers do exactly, you will find out through trial and error but some clear information would have helped. The graphics can be misleading if you are looking at the screenshots, they do appear to be very basic and in some ways they are, but once you see them in action the graphics looks much better. Music is a minimal background theme that does not intrude too much so you wont be reaching for the mute any time soon.
I did have a few minor issues with the controls. It uses a cursor like interface which means you have to move around the screen, I would have liked to have had a button available to speed up the movement as you are constantly moving around the screen either placing towers or collecting the cash from dead enemies. I also had a minor issue with the Tower placement system. Pressing A will bring up the Tower menu, X will change between the Tower types available and then pressing A will build it. It may just be me but I found it sometimes confusing during hectic times in the game.
Scribble Defense costs 80 :MSPoints: and is good value for money. The 21 levels will take some time to finish and there is good replayability to get grade A scores for each level. The new features such as the Push and Pull towers add a welcome breath of life to the genre. The difficulty levels are just right and this could be a good introductory game for people new to Tower Defense style games. Definitely check this one out!
More information on Scribble Defense as well as the trial and full versions of the game can be found on the Marketplace.
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