Immortal Defense is a tower defense game. Normally those don’t hold my interest for very long, but for some reason I ended up finding this one fairly engaging. One reason is probably because it has a plot, but it also used some interesting an innovative gameplay mechanics that I believe alleviated some of my misgivings about the genre.

The premise of the story is that it’s a super high-tech sci-fi world. Your homeworld is under attack by evil expansionist aliens known as “bavakh”, and, with the help of another alien race who has allied with humans against the bavakh, your homeworld has developed a new experimental technology. It can combat spaceships traveling through hyperspace (think warp jumps) by placing people’s minds in a state of being even higher than hyperspace, called “pathspace”. These “path defenders” are organized to defend against the offensive launches of the bavakh and destroy them before they can exit hyperspace and reach their destination to wreak havoc.

Sounds like a perfect setup for tower defense gameplay, no? What’s interesting, though, is that it makes a few significant departures from the usual paradigms. Your avatar – represented by that glowing mouse-cursor thing – can attack enemies directly, by automatically firing bullets at nearby enemies. You can also cease firing to charge up for a more powerful attack, and you get a new one after you complete each chapter of the story. The damage inflicted generally isn’t significant, but it does eliminate what is by far by my main complaint about tower defense games: lack of direct control and involvement. In most tower defense games, you’re often abstracted from the action at hand and can only involve yourself indirectly by adding towers – or if you can attack directly, it’s through expensive or inefficient methods. I know some people like that, but I don’t, and it really helps to soothe that frustration of an enemy getting just past past your towers’ range with only a sliver of health left.

However, it quickly becomes clear that your direct attacks alone aren’t enough to stem the tides of bavakh, so you need to use defensive structures – here termed “points”, and they’re one of the most interesting things about the game. According to the story, they’re actually extensions or parts of your personality, given form in pathspace to exert your will on the world. It’s very weird and surreal, but so is the general concept. However, this also means that the points all have distinct personalities in and of themselves. Most of them even introduce themselves to you in the level where you first obtain them. When you deploy them, they even talk amongst themselves with little dialogue snippets relating to events that happen on the field – being placed, inflicting a kill, and so on. They also aren’t just shoehorned into the typical roles associated with most tower defense games. Some of them do fulfill those general roles – love points are a pretty by-the-books support tower, for instance – but a lot of them actually have rather unique roles and applications. One of my favorites is the pride point, which otherwise fills the “slow but really strong” tower role. The catch is that it actually levels up – every time it scores a kill, its attack power increases. Placed properly near the start of a level, and it can quickly become overwhelmingly powerful, capable of one-shotting almost anything. There are plenty of other interesting ones too, with weird (and possibly symbolic) attack movements, bullets that loop around the screen (effectively having infinite range), and so on. Experimenting with the different points and coming up with an effective strategy for all of them was a lot of fun. My only criticism is that they’re rather top-heavy – you can almost all of them in the first campaign, and the last one is gotten exactly halfway through the game. That means that the joy and wonder of getting new points to experiment with is lost in the second half of the game, which makes it get very dull and repetitive by the end. But, I suppose there are a lot of games with that problem.

Something that I found particularly cool were the upgrade mechanics. Each point has exactly seven upgrade levels, and this is actually handled in a rather interesting way. Upgrading points doesn’t improve them linearly, but exponentially – however, the cost increases exponentially as well. Stronger points are therefore actually much more effective than multiple weaker ones, but the costs quickly become prohibitive. It’s rather empowering to progress through the levels and start being able to regularly access upgrade levels that were previously so far out of your reach you thought you’d never see them. This is mechanic is further strengthened by the maximum upgrade of each point typically granting it a special power that often counteract the weaknesses that you’ve had to plan around through the rest of the game. For instance, pride points will gain rapid fire, love points will gain infinite range, fear points will go into a panic and spray bullets everywhere, and so on. This does alleviate end-game fatigue somewhat, though unfortunately not enough, I felt.

The boss fights felt poorly balanced. There’s one on the last level of every campaign, except for the first and the last. However, I felt the hardest one was actually the very first. It’s a puzzle boss where you can’t place any direct attack towers – instead, you have to place support towers to bolster your ally’s attack towers. However – and this is never explained to you, I had to look an explanation up on the internet – the boss has a unique effect that is replicated by no other enemy in the game: it cannot be targeted by towers. As a result, there’s only one tower that can actually damage it, since it uses a weird firing mechanic that doesn’t target enemies directly – but you don’t know this in advance, so if you didn’t cluster all your support towers around that one, sucks to be you! To make matters worse, it can actually destroy your towers periodically, with no explanation or warning. (For bonus points, this actually violates narrative continuity, which states in no uncertain terms that pathspace objects and beings are invincible to anything in hyperspace.) You can attack it with your cursor’s regular bullets, but unless you time your charged attacks perfectly, you’ll be hard-pressed to defeat the thing in time. I didn’t have anywhere near as much trouble with any of the other bosses – as a matter of fact, there is one where, due to a loophole the game mechanics, you can win by doing absolutely nothing the entire battle. This seems like rather poor design to me.

The regular enemies, however, I found to be quite original and varied. They start off pretty generic – fast enemies, tough enemies, regenerating enemies, and so on. However, especially in the latter half of the game, they start getting more unique. There’s one enemy that blows up when destroyed, taking any nearby enemies with it – the flavor text states that the enemy is actually a ship that’s been overtaken by your allies, and which have rigged the ship to explode. It also states not to have qualms about destroying them, since they’re willing to give their lives to stop the bavakh, which is a lovely bit of subtly creepy background. There are also healer-type enemies, but they have impenetrable shields protecting their bodies. You have to position your shots so that they hit behind the shields in order to damage them, which I believe is not something I’ve ever seen in tower defense games. Then there are enemies which are actually immobile normally, and are in fact moved by being damaged. There’s also an enemy that no one who’s played this game will ever forget. It’s just called “:P” – yes, the emoticon. It is completely invincible as a default state, only becoming vulnerable after a certain period of time. Fortunately, they are stationary while they recharge their shield, but they’re still an absolute pain to get rid of, and I believe I lost most of my lives to them in the later levels. Overall, though, I really liked the enemies – they have lovely flavor text in the game’s help file, and I think some of them actually help to reinforce some of the game’s messages.

One thing that the game really struggles with, however, is pacing. Every campaign, or chapter, is separated into the same amount of stages (16), even when it’s painfully obvious the story arc for that campaign doesn’t have enough material to adequately fill the space. This is perhaps exacerbated by the story-telling mechanism – every level has a story segment before it, but there’s only ever one speaker at a time, and they only say one “box” of dialogue at once. Like this:

They can say a lot when they need to, but more often than not, they’re infuriatingly brief and cryptic. As a result, you’ll get weird things like two characters having a back-and-forth with you over successive stages, by which point you’ll probably have lost track of the conversation, or one speaker agonizingly drawing out one conversation that really could have been compressed into a single dialogue box. It’s very unfortunate that the gameplay, which at first works so well with the story, ends up really working at odds with it by the end. The levels are very pretty, but they quickly get repetitive and tedious after the game runs out of new mechanics to throw at you. The final campaign is particularly bad in this regard.

As for the story…well, in a word, it’s weird. In the early game, you’re literally talking to yourself most of the time, as your conversation partners are mostly your own points. It just gets more bizarre from there. The first part of the game makes it seem like, even with all the navel-gazing, it’s still going to be an actiony sci-fi adventure thing. However, somewhere around the halfway mark, it becomes something…distinctly different. It’s difficult to go into details without spoiling things, but overall I did like it. There’s a lot of philosophizing about immortality, violence, morality, and even the concept of defense itself – I’d even go so far as to say it’s a deconstruction of the tower defense genre. It makes a rather salient point about how, despite the genre (and what you’re doing) being termed “defense”, when you look at the objective gameplay mechanics, you’re only performing offense against enemies that can do nothing to stop you. Unfortunately, it…doesn’t really amount to much. There’s a lot of great buildup to disturbing reveals (although you’ll probably have guessed them by the time they’re confirmed), but it ends with a complete flop. The last chapter is basically just you talking to yourself about a whole lot of nothing (interspaced with ridiculously difficult battles that don’t make narrative sense), and then it just abruptly cuts off in an absolute non-ending. I…think the game was maybe trying to be profound about…something? If so, though, I really have no idea what it was trying to say by the end. I think that the fifth chapter was a perfectly good place to end the game on – it really felt like it’s what everything in the game was building to, and it’s suitably climactic. The final chapter feels kind of tacked on, like the developer didn’t really know where to take the story from there. It doesn’t even have a proper final boss! There is a secret mini-campaign unlocked by getting a perfect on every level and which ostensibly continues the main story, but it honestly just raises even more questions and ends on even more of a non-ending.

Also, like I mentioned in The Spirit Engine II, the game really suffers from lack of interactivity. I don’t want to spoil much, but I’ll just say that there’s a point in the game where you have no choice but to do something really horrible. No, really – if you don’t do it, you lose the level. The other characters are justifiably horrified afterwards, and it’s a harbringer of a major change in the story’s direction…yet the game does that thing where it seems to blame the player for it as this deep profound thing. Except I knew from the start that what I was doing seemed like a really bad idea, and was utterly unsurprised when it turned out to have horrible consequences, so the game can’t even call me out on just blindly following the game’s orders. There are games where this kind of thing can be extremely effective (see Spec Ops: The Line), and I guess maybe it might work for players who are more used to tower defense games (and who don’t pay attention to the story for some reason), but for me, it just fell flat.

Oh, and the main character, despite being an immaterial ghost, is explicitly stated to be male. With a wife. I really don’t get why this is so prevalent in games. Do developers think that most of their playerbase will be straight guys, and therefore the game avatar must be as well or it’ll totally break immersion? It just seems unnecessary to me. I mean, seriously, immaterial ghost. If there was any game that could easily get away with making the protagonist have no stated gender, it would be this one. At least his daughter is a fairly important character.

The soundtrack is absolutely lovely though! Its application is rather limited due to the nature of the genre (most of the soundtrack is battle tracks), but I still really like it. It’s been uploaded to YouTube, and you can listen to it here. I particularly enjoy the title screen music and the boss music.

So, on the whole, I think I’d tentatively recommend it. I wouldn’t say it’s worth the original price the developer once sold it at, but it can now be downloaded for a pittance. If you can at least tolerate tower defense gameplay, you’ll probably find it fun, and the story is definitely worth seeing despite the issues I outlined above. Just be prepared for disappointment at the finish line.