McDroid

Genre: Tower Defense

Players: 1

.

Review:

McDroid, released on PC in 2012, brought to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016, and then ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022, is a Tower Defense game where players control a robotic droid installing defensive emplacements to fend off giant enemy bugs threatening your crashed spaceship.

McDroid makes use of some pretty good 3D visuals for its characters and environments, accompanied by a “Wacky” voice for the ship’s AI that bosses you around, and backed by energetic music that quickly takes a back seat to the frenetic action.

When it comes to that action, the clever thing McDroid does is that your droid can hold an active emplacement, effectively making you one of the towers defending your base and moving around to where you’re best needed. It’s a small but excellent change to the Tower Defense formula that gives it much more of a real-time Action element.

Unfortunately, the game’s tutorial is inadequate in explaining how everything works, and as such it leaves players scrambling to try to figure out what they’re doing. Perhaps worse, the enemies in this game are damage sponges, and even fully upgrading your towers (once you can even do that) will result in it taking terribly long to take down enemies. What’s more, often enemies that go down will leave a corrosive presence that damages your turrets, and that also takes an excruciatingly long time to dispatch.

As a result, McDroid is a Tower Defense game that looks great, has some good ideas, and yet is still not very fun to play. For all the things it does right, it is just too tedious and frustrating to actually take out enemies, resulting in a game that had tons of potential, but it feels like it squandered that potential.

tl;dr – McDroid is a Tower Defense game where players move around a droid and install emplacements to fend off giant invading insect enemies. This game has a good presentation and some clever ideas it brings to the genre, but the act of actually gunning down enemies is so tedious and frustrating that it saps much of the fun out of the game. Only fans of Tower Defense games should bother with this.

Grade: C+

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