Defender Heroes TD – Quick look
I accidentally discovered Defender Heroes while browsing the Android gaming forums couple of days ago. I was going to write a short “new game” article, but I got held up that day and ended up having the game on my phone longer than I originally intended. This gave me a chance to take a closer look and write something more about it and I am glad I did.
The first thing I noticed on Defender Heroes: Castle Defense TD’s Play Store page is the lack of any in-game footage. The couple of screen shots attached are all hidden behind pieces of artwork and there is no trailer of any kind. I say, this is something publishers and developers should avoid, yes the artwork is cute, but players would like to see how the game really looks like before tapping the install button. Luckily, Defender Heroes has nothing to be ashamed of. The graphics in general and hero drawings, while not entirely original, are looking perfectly fine for a mobile game.
After installing the game, I was very surprised to see the title screen showing “Heroes Defender”. Since I am not really a big fan of the current naming trend, I had to double check if I installed the right game. And yes, that was the game. Why is the name in reverse, beats me and it doesn’t really matter.
Defender Heroes gameplay
Defender Heroes is a castle defense game where your mighty heroes are literally defending the castle walls from the incoming hordes. If you ever played the legendary flash game “Elona Shooter”, you know how it goes. The only difference is that heroes will auto-shoot everything approaching, with only exception being the spells (or special abilities) that you will have to time manually.
You start off with only one hero and work your way up. Completing levels will award you between 1 and 3 stars, gold and diamonds. You can spend the stars upgrading the talent tree and tweaking stuff like hero accuracy, diamond bonuses, castle hit points etc. After stage 15 enemies will start dropping loot as well. This can either be equipment pieces or hero evolution shards, which are needed to evolve your heroes from common (green) to rare (blue) and so on.
At this point, you get the impression that the game is supplying you with “abundant amounts” of gold pieces, but don’t be fooled. Once you reach level 30, you will quickly spend it all on castle upgrades, hero levels and gear forging. The second resource (diamonds) are needed for totem upgrades, gear acquisition and testing your luck by drawing a random loot from the bar.
The goblin shaman appearing at the start of each level will toss a random totem that will help you during the fight. There are 6 different totems that can be upgraded with gems and if you don’t like the totem assigned on the current level, you can spend 5 gems to get a new one (or just restart the game). Soon after filling all your heroes item slots, you will start getting duplicate drops. Those can be used to upgrade your favorite pieces and improve their base stats.
The game is not really difficult as long as you keep upgrading stuff, but I did notice a pattern of “choke” levels, 30 being a perfect example of. Keep in mind that if you are getting close passing a choke point, but still not quite there yet – totems can help you a great deal.
Ads, in-app purchases
First of all, Defender Heroes has no “stamina” system and you can play as much as you want. Also, there are no intrusive ads during the battles. From time to time, after finishing a level the game will “make” you watch short 5 second videos, but that’s about it. Of course you can voluntarily watch ads in exchange for diamonds or other goodies, but that is completely optional. If you don’t feel like playing couple of days and grinding your way to glory, you can buy some of the in-app purchases to speed things up a bit.
All in all, Defender Heroes is a fun game to play. I do have a message to the developers, update the game with more than one level variety. I would love to see couple of different themes and weather conditions, check points on the map, boss battles and more heroes.
You can download Defender Heroes: Castle Defense TD by following the link bellow, or check out the short gameplay video I recorded by clicking here.
Martin Janov
