Revenge of The Titans

Revenge of the Titans Review

They're baaaaaaaack!

The tower defense genre follows a basic formula -- creeps (or enemies) follow a set path and the player places towers along the sides of the path to shoot them to death. In those games the strategy is to slow the creeps down and inflict as much damage to them as efficiently as possible. In some games the creeps don't follow a set path, instead taking the shortest possible line to the exit. The strategy in these games then becomes a mixture of the slow/damage technique of the first one, and building your towers in such a way that the creeps have to take as long a path as possible to get to the end.

But what happens if the creeps ignore the towers, or attempt to avoid them altogether? You get an incredibly challenging, sometimes frustrating strategy game. You get Revenge of the Titans from Puppy Games. The titular Titans are a race of massive but simplistic-looking aliens hell bent on wiping our handsome species from the face of the planet. You have to defend the earth with towers and eventually take the fight to them. This is explained to you by a military man and a scientist, whose voice-overs -- a series of "blahs" -- are wonderfully abstract, in keeping with the pseudo-8-bit design.


The campaign starts off simply. At the beginning of the game you are only capable of building Blasters, which are your basic shooty-tower. To build them you need cash, which can be obtained by clicking on icons which occasionally spawn somewhere on the map, or by harvesting crystals with refineries. Titans tend to loosely stick to roads, so lining a path with blaster and keeping your refineries on the other side is a simple and effective strategy. At the end of each level the game "recycles" whatever buildings you've got still standing for more cash and dishes out small bonuses for various medals you can win and for the amount of crystal you've harvested. That cash is then available for you to use in the next stage. It's a simple formula that's firmly grounded in tower defense traditions, albeit broken-up, and with the harvesting of the RTS genre to add some thought to how you build your structures. It's a solid, though well established hook, and it is executed well in Revenge of the Titans.

At the beginning of every level you get to choose a technology to research. More advanced blasters, lasers, rocket launchers, mines, cloaking devices, barriers and many more usable structures all sit at the tail end of research chains. Revenge of the Titans does a good job of hinting at what you will need to research to easily pass the next stage, but there are also times when, in my case due to a glitch, you face an enemy that hasn't even been properly introduced to you. The problem with the upgrade system is that many of the technologies you research do absolutely nothing but open up other avenues of research. Obtaining a new Blaster, for example, will take up an entire level's worth of research, which makes all the technologies you obtained in leading up to it feel like filler.


This becomes problematic when you are in later levels and are struggling to advance, but have to choose between researching a root-technology for, say, a Capacitor to deal with Ghosts on the next level, or something that will be more immediately beneficial. If you choose to pursue the Capacitor you gimp yourself in the current level because you get no improvement, and if you choose to pursue something to help you more immediately then you essentially can't beat the ghost level. Hard counters like this tend to ruin tower defense games for me, and while there is an alternative to the Capacitor, it takes a while to build towards and sacrifices the effectiveness of every other tower just so you can kill ghosts more effectively.

The way cash works is also an issue, as a single bad level can screw up your chances at later ones. If you lose your cash stockpile by trying to brute-force your way through one stage, those losses snowball in later levels. I found myself unable to get a really good foothold on the final stage of the game because I simply didn't have enough cash to get established.

Luckily, Revenge of the Titans is fairly forgiving and will randomly generate an easier level if you request it (at the cost of a "gold medal" for completing the level). I found I had to do this in the last quarter of the game especially. While the Titans start off moving predictably by following roads and trying to destroy your base, by the end of the game the Titans actively avoid your turrets, pursue your refineries and try to destroy the biggest threats. They also gain the ability to shoot energy at your structures. This makes Revenge of the Titans immensely difficult, even on the "easier" randomly generated levels, but not impossible, especially once you learn how the Titans behave and why. These "intelligent" enemies add a lot of depth that standard tower defense games generally lack.


Revenge of the Titans also comes with two side modes -- Endless is a "never-ending series of increasingly hectic battles" which follows the same structure as the campaign, minus the story and plus an extra 200 stages (at least). Survival is more akin to what tower defense veterans might expect. You're given a randomly-generated map and some starting funds, and crystals gradually spawn in random places across the map. Monsters start to pour in from the sides and increase in difficulty until you are ultimately overcome. The difficulty increases very quickly -- even the highest scoring players don't last longer than half an hour. The two modes provide a much more streamlined experience than the campaign, though portions will be locked until the campaign has been completed.


Revenge of the Titans does a lot of clever stuff within the tower defense genre, emulating the same rules-based gameplay that made the genre popular while adding new complications. But it is also let down by the flaws that plague the genre -- the snowball effect of mistakes, the necessity to plan and build for specialized enemies at the cost of overall effectiveness. The upgrade system also leaves a lot to be desired. Tower defense purists will adore the challenges of perfecting build orders and planning three levels in advance, but the sharp difficulty curve and poor upgrade system prevent it from having mass appeal.

In This Article

Revenge of The Titans

Platforms:PC, Macintosh, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3
Developers:Curve Digital, Puppygames
Publishers:Iceburg Entertainment, Puppygames, Curve Digital
Features:Number Of Players
Release Date:March 16, 2011
Revenge of the Titans Review
Revenge of the Titans Review