Critical Play: Theme-Only Tower Defense Games
Pokemon Tower Defense vs. Plants Versus Zombies
Probably an uncontroversial position: tower defense games are not all that interesting in-and-of themselves. Anything where you need a speed-control to avert boredom while playing seems questionable to me. Even after a critical play, and watching a whole video on its tutorial system, I’m not sure why I like Plants versus Zombies. I think this is true of a lot of theme-only games. Match-three and bubble-shooters aren’t that fun either without some additional element of logic or physics puzzle. I think physics games like Cut the Rope and Angry Birds are significantly more interesting because they generally have something resembling a right answer. Tower defense games might too, but it’s too often a matter of grinding until you can buy the power-ups (or equivalent) that allow you to beat the puzzle: not using logic and acquired skills.
Plants versus Zombies, at least in my experience of it, avoids the sensation of needing to grind quite well through virtue of excellent level design. I played through the entire first game some time ago, and I never needed to play through a level more than two or three times: that was enough to understand what plants would be most effective where and execute. You don’t have to buy your towers, except through sun which comes freely or you produce yourself. The coin mechanic is largely immaterial, or was to my gameplay.
Plants versus Zombies is one of the only tower defense games I’ve played since I was in elementary school. I don’t like grinding. So what can make me do it?
Pokémon.
The conceit of Pokémon Tower Defense is that it’s a completely classic tower defense game, but with a Pokémon storyline and Pokémon taking the roles of both the turrets and the enemies. The coolest mechanic in the game is the ability to capture some of your enemies once they get down to a certain low health level by “throwing” your pokéball at them. This allows you to collect nearly every type of pokémon you see in the game.
This capturing mechanic is, in my opinion, one of the only things that redeems this game from complete mind-numbingness. The others are the storyline, and the fact that leveling up your pokémon not only makes them more powerful defensive turrets (as you would expect), it also, eventually, gives you the chance to see them evolve.
Basically, Pokémon Tower Defense combines the fantasy-based fun of a virtual pet game, like Neko Atsume, with the challenge and submission-based fun of tower defense. This combination makes me willing to (on occasion) spend hours on building carefully curated collections of unique pokémon (not the most effective way to play the game if you want to advance quickly, but the only one with a point from my perspective).
Returning to my point about the capturing mechanic: imagine if you did this with a more traditional war-like tower defense game: what if your knowledge of what was coming at you next became dependent on your ability to capture enemy troops? What if story was revealed based on who you captured when? This suddenly sounds interesting (to me).
I think this might be the trick to Theme-Only games. They’re not theme-only. The addition of some specific novel mechanic that makes sense with the theme can mean even players who absolutely loathe grinding will spend time with the game to fully experience and exploit that novelty. This comes back to what many of the resources we’ve read this quarter highlight: fun happens when we are learning.
