Review: Locke’s Quest (DS game)

Locke’s quest is a tower defense game.  It’s a fairly common genre for web games, but I hadn’t actually played one previously.  That said, I always enjoyed trying to fortify my bases in real-time strategy games, despite the fact that in most that’s not actually a particularly effective tactic.

The game itself pits your character, Locke, against wave upon wave of clockwork enemies.  The build and combat modes are split.  There’s typically two to three minutes to first set up your base, a few minutes of attacks, and then the cycle repeats with a bit less time for maintenance.  Survive a number of days and you then go on to a new map, with conditions sometimes changing mid-map. I’m not normally a big fan of time limits, but in this case they kept things moving nicely.  Interestingly, time is the only real sunk cost in the game.  You have to repair/replace towers damaged in the combat phase, but you can sell off anything you built at full value.  During the combat phase Locke can spend his time on a mix of repairing your walls and turrets and attacking the enemy.  There’s multiple types of attacks and each has its own little mini-game, although I tended to use the acid attack in most any circumstances.

The building involves laying out auto-firing towers, cheaper walls to surround and directly strengthen them, traps that only last a round, and buffing segment that add special abilities to the towers.  The traps might actually be a little cheap when it come to balance, I found them a highly affordable and effective option even on early, easier, day.  One other interesting variant, you can pick building materials which makes each tower and wall stronger but also more expensive.  I was often flush enough with resources that I didn’t need the cheaper options, but I do think it added something to the game.

The core game play is a fun and thanks to good map design and mid-map scenario change it stays varied and interesting.  There is a good mix of clockwork baddies, although some with special abilities, like invisibility or flying, only show up on certain maps which makes countermeasures very hit or miss.  I’d have preferred less gimmicky baddies and defenses and instead having them be more like the burrowers who influence design tactics but don’t require special equipment.  The AI is fairly dumb.  It will exploit holes in your defenses, but only if the holes are fairly close to its default path.  This is mitigated some by pulling in enemies from multiple start points who have different paths.  When the holes are exploited though, it’s rather scary as all your defenses are weaker from the sides and back.  Also a bit annoying is that using walls that are pre-built in the map are indestructible but don’t increase the defensive value of your towers like walls you build do.  This sometimes results in building walls in front of the pre-builts on the map, which mostly bugs me because it’s just inelegant.  I’d accept if they existing features were destroyable so long as I could fully exploit them.

The story ha some interesting twists, I liked the supporting characters even though the protagonist sometimes did not.  That said, I found the ending unsatisfying and pseudo-profound.   It involves a fairly common error, endings should not involve that much discussion of the mechanics of souls in your particular universe.  Speculative theology, unlike science fiction, tends not to be well thought out or insightful into the human condition. The supporting mini-games, one involving you controlling a tower, one ‘design’ screen where you used parts to copy a picture of your next turret, were cute though not hugely exciting.  The design game made me wish I could actually customize my turrets, but there is a good mix in the game so that’s not a huge problem.  Although I haven’t used it yet, one great addition is that once you beat the game, you can replay any of the levels at will. 

On the whole, this is a fun game about making tradeoffs with time and resources.  The multiple wave structure allows for fixing early mistakes or building on good ideas.  There’s often a satisfying feeling of desperation near the end of a later wave as you frantically work to get your defenses to hold.  There’s some complaints that the game lets you carry over too many resources, that’s probably true, although they give you the map minimum in replay so it’s less of a problem for the hard core.  I’d say the main missing element to the game play is an incentive to defend more than just the ‘source wells’ the clockwork enemies are trying to get to.  Sometimes you have allies, and if they’re outside your walls, they’re probably toast.  They aren’t that useful on the inside, but they do help if your defenses are overrun.  However, that incentive is mostly present in earlier levels.  There can be advantages in plugging up enemy entry points or setting up secondary front, but on the whole the time efficient thing to do is just to build the best towers out of the best materials in a limited space.  More tradeoffs here would add to game play depth in my view.

Finally, I’d pick up a sequel, but it would also be interesting to see the premise played with.  In some ways, responding to natural disasters, floods in particular, seem to be highly relevant to this kind of game play. But what really might rock would be a zombie variant.  In that case, require allies to man the fortifications and to give the supporting bonuses.  If a turret goes down you don’t just have a breach, they’ve got another zombie.  Trying to save as many people as possible and needing those people to man your fortifications would add the strategic depth I was talking about before.

Source: Impulse buy.  I think I heard about it first from MTV Multiplayer and Stephen Totilo