Critical Play: Theme Only Games
I will be talking about two games in the tower defense genre, Plants vs. Zombies and Bloons TD, both available on the phone and on steam.
The first game I will talk about is Bloons TD, this game plays similar to most games in the genre where there is a path that the enemies will take and move through and it is up to the user to defend against this attack through placements of units/resources which will attack the enemies. One of the main gameplay elements that I enjoy about Bloons TD is that there are a variety of different maps with different tracks the enemies will follow, which keeps the game fresh and necessitating the user to use different strategies for different maps depending on the environment. Specifically for the theme of the game, it has balloons be the enemies and monkeys being the allies. This is a fairly simple and fun theme, where it makes some form of sense that monkeys who shoot darts or lasers would be able to pop a balloon. Another aspect that I really enjoy with the idea that the enemies are balloons is that whenever a balloon pops/dies it produces a popping sound, which they made to be a very pleasing and rewarding sound, especially on higher levels when you are popping multiple balloons at once.
The next game I will talk about is Plants vs. Zombies, and this game is also a traditional tower defense game, but the main differences compared to bloons are that instead of a track the enemies walk through, it is simply a lane in this game, where different maps have different lanes open. The other main difference is the obvious different theme, with allies being plants and enemies being zombies. Gameplay wise, I much prefer Bloons over this game because I find the lanes in which the zombies walk through to be fairly boring compared to long tracks. On the topic of theme I think Plants vs. Zombies does a great job with it’s choice of enemies being zombies being logically it makes sense to the user that zombie will go slow and be dumb enough to go through only one lane. I also think the choice of plants are strong because the setting is typically a garden for these maps, and thus it makes sense that plants would be the main wave of defense!
