Defend Your Castle

"Awesome game for the price."

With the recent launch of the WiiWare service, I was fully set on buying Nintendo's latest first party opus (if you will), Dr. Mario, and practically nothing else. But, alas, that did not happen. We were duped! In fact, absolutely nothing has been published by Nintendo the first week of releases. Although I am still slightly disappointed, the North American launch of WiiWare truly lets the third party devs shine. A couple of the games are rather generic and not personally my thing (VIP Blackjack, TV Show King), but the rest of them show great promise in the future of WiiWare and third parties on a Nintendo platform in general.

The best value for your money could possibly be Defend Your Castle, despite being an almost identical version of the popular, free flash game. At only five dollars, you will be constantly surprised with how much you can actually get out of the title, in both single and multiplayer.

The whole point of the game is neatly summarized in the title. You defend your castle as hordes of angry stick figures try to quickly demolish your royal real-estate. It gets as simple as simply clicking on one stick figure at a time using A and flinging the Wii-more upwards. Ta daa! Along the way, you'll gain enough points from doing this rather amusing act to purchase a "pit of conversion," which in turn lets you grab your many, many enemies and convert them into one of your hopefully many allies. These allies can then resort to using magic (erase the enemies with a huge eraser, etc), put their rusty bows and arrows to use, help you deal with intense amounts of damage or simply run into enemies with a bomb whilst committing cartoony suicide.

As you should probably be able to tell, it's a very simple game yet retains some decent depth for some long play sessions. The normal game starts out incredibly slow, with the first fifteen levels rather boring. It isn't until you get into the 20s when the game goes from gentle to insane. Dozens upon dozens of stick figures and large monsters will run east to your castle to destroy it with all the might they can muster, which happens to be a lot. This is a difficult game, there's no doubting that, but it's really addictive and gives you a definite "just one more try" feeling, something you'll probably be saying often.

The biggest difference from the free, nice enough flash version is the addition of multiplayer. Instead of one reticule bouncing around the screen looking for new victims, you can have up to four. Not only is it incredibly fun, it's actually almost a must by the time you get into the mid 30s level wise. It also becomes both cooperative and competitive; while you and your buddies are defending the same castle, the person with the most points will end up being the so-called "king of the castle," in which they will get to do the upgrades on their own and manage the newly converted allies. It's not the best reward in the world, but it definitely adds another layer of depth to the game. Another plus is that new players can simply press A to join a game whenever they want -- be it during an intense level or right before, the whole drop in/drop out feature works well.

The slightly less important upgrade from the flash version is the presentation. The graphics have been completely redone, looking more like a 2nd grader's school project than anything. It's certainly intentional, though -- the clouds are hung by strings, the stick figures feature bottle caps for heads and the environment looks like it was cut out of construction paper. There have been slight arguments on whether or not the graphics are good or bad -- although intentionally amateurish, I'm going to play the devil's advocate and say they actually look great. I haven't been so charmed by a 2D creation since Yoshi's Island -- there is real humor and spark to the way things look in this game, and as a result it makes the game seem more fun than it ever used to be.

My only real gripe is that excessive amounts of playtime can hurt your wrist more than you'd like -- especially in the later levels, flicking up and down constantly just begins to smart real badly. A break every once in awhile is strongly encouraged.

Long story short, is it worth paying five dollars for something you can get for free (legally)? In this case, without a doubt. You're basically paying for multiplayer and a niftier presentation, but since they're both so good and the game itself is inherently addictive as all hell, Defend Your Castle is one of the easiest ways to spend five dollars.

Buy it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/14/08