Planetary Defense Force

Genre: Tower Defense / 2-Stick Shooter

Players: 1

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Review:

Planetary Defense Force is a Tower Defense game combined with a 2-Stick Shooter, a combination that worked extraordinarily well for X-Morph Defense. In this game, players defend the Earth from otherworldly invaders, with the gameplay divided into three parts – on the surface, you’re constructing buildings to help you collect resources and upgrade your ship, on an orblit-level shield you’re constructing towers to fight the incoming threat, and on that level you’re also hunting down any enemies the towers didn’t take out and shooting them down personally, two-stick shooter style.

The graphics in Planetary Defense Force are surprisingly good for a $5 game, with bright colors and a lot of detail. It’s nothing truly jaw-dropping, but it’s still a pretty good presentation overall.

Unfortunately, this presentation causes one of the game’s biggest problems in its gameplay – the choice to present the game’s planet and shield as spherical make it very difficult to get a feel for the overall state of the battlefield. The game tries to help by having arrows point in the direction of enemies, but that’s hardly an indication of what types of enemies are where, the health of your turrets, how effective (or not) said turrets are being against enemies, what enemies are directly attacking your shield… I found myself seeing my shield’s life bar constantly draining away, without any good idea how best to stop the problem, as much as I scurried about trying to down enemies and build turrets.

The other issue here is one of multitasking – while the game gives players free reign to focus on the three different levels of gameplay, it doesn’t do a very good job at stressing which of these elements is the best to focus on at any given moment.

Add these all up, and the result is players repeatedly losing in the face of the alien horde, and not really sure what they could be doing better to counter it, which is a recipe for frustration. I wish I could say that even the individual elements here are fun, but even there, there are problems. The game doesn’t do a good job of indicating what type of turrets are best in which situations, there’s little notion that any turret placement is any different than any other turret placement, there’s not a good indication of what weapon upgrades do for you, and the enemies themselves are bullet sponges, limiting the fun of the Two-Stick Shooter part of the game.

It’s a shame that Planetary Defense Force has so many problems, because it looks good and has some really good ideas that, if properly developed, could have made for a unique and fun game. However, as-is, this game was one big sphere of frustration for me, and I can’t recommend it.

tl;dr – Planetary Defense Force mixes the Tower Defense genre with the 2-Stick Shooter, having players defend a spherical planet from an alien invasion. Unfortunately, the spherical map makes it difficult to keep track of what’s going on, the game doesn’t do a good job of indicating important information the player needs, and the individual elements themselves are not very satisfying. The result is a frustrating game that’s not worth playing.

Grade: D+

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