Wall Defender

"How long can you prolong your inevitable destruction by kamikaze aliens?"

A common theme in tales is the will of human beings. Often you find people in tough situations finally sorting everything out through their power of will. Often you'll see those vastly outnumbered pulling the win in the end against those with the realistic odds. By hard work and determination you can overcome any difficulty and accomplish whatever you set your mind to, isn't that what they always say?

Well Wall Defender capitalizes on this and puts you all alone defending a wall against a vast number of alien kamikaze fighters headed towards it. You're in the rectangular wall, moving inside it and shooting the aliens that relentlessly come at you from all sides. Against all hope, firing your petty laser against uncountable numbers of alien creatures with an only purpose of destroying your wall.

Gradually the alien types change, becoming smaller and faster and more often will alien bosses try to come at you to destroy your wall with their one hit explosions. Your quick footwork and fluid shooting is only good to a degree, for when protecting this outer wall, aliens will frequently appear at two different sides with it being impossible to kill both of them and continuing.

And when inevitably the outer wall is destroyed, you move into the wall inside it. Being smaller and with a shorter distance to navigate fully this wall makes going from one side to the other easier. But how good can you be when you're expected to eliminate a dozen creatures in the short span of mere seconds? That's right; you can't, so your second wall will be destroyed, and you find yourself pushed to the third.

It is now when you sense death in the air, but because you're in outer space, you don't really sense anything. You feel it in your body instead, waiting in anticipation to take you away. Simpering and prepared, it readies itself to take you to oblivion, to where you'll spend an eternity of misery and anguish. To where happiness is replaced by pain, to where no one wishes to go, where one would do anything to escape.

But worse is that you can't think of this, you can't reflect on the end of your existence. After all, you're surrounded by kamikaze aliens wiggling their way to your precious third wall, aren't you? Soon you'll find out that the one hit kill bosses have increased in number, that hope is fading, that perhaps your complete mastering of moving and shooting is not enough, and that you are forced to fall back to the fourth and final wall.

It is here where all things come into perspective. The short space of navigation through this small inner wall is like the amount of life that there is left to live. And when mass numbers of aliens come and you, trapped away in the middle of no where in outer space, give all your might to prolong the hour of when the wall is destroyed, you realize that it is useless. You see the wall blinking signifying the end of its power, but what are you to do?

Do you continue fighting for the last couple of minutes before you are destroyed in outer space? Do you sit back and watch while the aliens greedily give all their will and lives in order to destroy you? Realizing that their instincts are telling them to do this as much as yours are telling you to defend against them. That as fate would have it, you're fighting a mirror image of determination and will power.

So will you continue fighting till the end, or will you sit back near the end after giving them a good fight, or maybe you'd give up right at the start and not play this game in the first place? Thus is the dilemma of life -- that it will inevitably end. So will you keep fighting until its end, or will you give up and go into obscurity at one point or the other? Will you remain strong and fighting obstacles or give up hope and become weak?

Playing Wall Defender will make you reflect on life, and its unique design stands out in the overcrowded space shooter genre so give it a try if you will. The difficulty and impossibility of surviving for a long time might label it as too hard for some, but some will look at it in a different angle (like me!) and realize that with great difficulty comes the great determination needed to even it out. Listening to Moonlight Sonata helped me out a bit too because the game's sounds suck ass.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/16/06