Defend Your Castle

Genre: Tower Defense / Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Defend Your Castle is an Arcade-style Tower Defense game originally released as a free Macromedia Flash game on PC web browsers in 2003, with the game becoming popular enough that in 2008, the game got an official release on PC, as well as a port to the Wii’s WiiWare service with re-worked graphics and added 4-player co-op. Then, in 2019, this version of the game was ported to mobile devices and Nintendo Switch, albeit without the co-op, and with the motion controls replaced with touchscreen controls. As such, this game is only playable in handheld mode.

As with the WiiWare release of the game, this version of Defend Your Castle features crudely-drawn 2D backgrounds and stickmen, as well as pictures of objects like popsicle sticks standing in for battering rams. And as with the Nintendo Switch version, this release has no blood, making it more family-friendly, for better or worse.

So you already saw some of the bad news in the first paragraph – this is a game that cannot be played in docked mode. No attempt has been made here to replicate the WiiWare game’s motion-sensing gameplay. Instead, you’re stuck using the touchscreen.

However, the bright side of this is that the touchscreen is clearly the best way to play this game, and I cannot imagine how it caught on with any other control scheme. Players must eliminate stickman attackers by touching them and dragging them to fling them into the sky, letting gravity do the rest. This is intuitive, and works extremely well.

The problem here is… everything else. Defend Your Castle is an extremely shallow game. You’ll be selecting upgrades for your castle over time, occasionally dropping enemies in a “pit of conversion” to transform them into forces you can use to staff the four different towers of your castle. But overall you’ll mostly just be flicking enemy after enemy, over and over again, until their number becomes so overwhelming that they manage to break down your castle.

What’s worse, as mentioned before, this game ditches the WiiWare’s 4-player mode, no doubt due to the game becoming handheld-only. This means what little fun could be gleaned from this game in a party setting is completely stripped out of the game.

And yet, the Nintendo Switch release of Defend Your Castle still bears the same $5 price tag it had on the Wii over 15 years ago. This price might have seemed understandable if this game kept the motion controls and 4-player and added the improved touchscreen controls as an option, but with this game having arguably fewer features than it did a decade and a half ago, it’s really hard to see the value here.

I suppose, as a silly time-waster, some people may still get some enjoyment out of Defend Your Castle on Nintendo Switch, and I do think the touchscreen controls are the best way to play this game… but it’s still a shallow, repetitive, boring game, one that had more features for the same price over fifteen years ago, and one that is still to this day freely available to play on online browsers on your PC. With this being the case, it’s hard to see any reason to buy this version of the game.

tl;dr – Defend Your Castle is an Arcade-style Tower Defense game that started out as a Flash web browser game, with players tasked with flicking enemy stickmen into the sky to get rid of them. Unfortunately, this game being playable only in handheld mode, missing multiplayer and motion controls from the earlier WiiWare release, and the core gameplay being repetitive and shallow, all add up to a game that just isn’t worth getting on Nintendo Switch, even if the touchscreen controls are the best way to play this.

Grade: D+

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