Castle Conqueror Defender for the Nintendo 3DS eShop is a pretty good game, even though some of the controls aren’t as fluid as I would have liked. While the controls are a pit of a pain, it doesn’t really take away from the enjoyment of the overall game.
The fate of a noble land rests on your shoulders in this Medieval-themed castle defense game.
As one of the last loyal generals of the realm, it is your mission to defend your land and train brave, ordinary men into exceptional warriors. Will you succeed or fall in battle? The fate of a noble land rests on your shoulders in this Medieval-themed castle defense game.
The game is a tower defense game where you are tasked with protecting your castle from an invading army. At the beginning of each round you can buy and place units, repair and upgrade your fortress, set traps and basically get ready for the next wave of attackers. Nothing new or amazing here, but it’s fun to play.
The game consists of campaign mode where you have ten campaigns with five levels each. The early levels aren’t really that tough, and if you set out your units properly before each round they can pretty much handle themselves. One advantage in the levels is the power of archers. They are very useful when attacking enemy units before they get to your castle, and are very good to place on castle walls where they can’t be attacked from ground based units. Aside from enemy archers however.
There is also a good assortment of traps that you can place near your castle. The most useful is the buried spikes, which will kill the first unit to walk over them. Placing a lot of these, especially in strips, is a good way to kill your foes before they can even swing a sword at your units. These traps are also pretty cheap too, which is nice.
Overall money doesn’t seem to be that much of an issue in the game. Units are pretty cheap (10-50 gold) and traps are just 10 gold a piece. You’ll also gain gold at the end of each round, which I found was enough to sustain my forces pretty well.
The game also features glory mode, where you are tasked to survive for 20 days, and crusader mode where you must defend the Holy Land against the Mamelukes. Both of these modes are locked until you complete the campaign mode, so I didn’t get a chance to try these modes out just yet.
My only issue with the game is a matter of controls, in that you can’t control the active battle with the touch screen. With all of the action taking place on the top screen, it’s impossible to tap, drag or command any units with the stylus. This would seem like a natural fit with the 3DS but this option doesn’t exist. Second to that is that you also can’t select multiple units at once. No click and drag to select more than one unit at a time. This makes moving a few units to a point tedious and frustrating.
Select one unit, use the circle pad to move the curser and select where you want the unit to move. Move the curser back to another unit and repeat this step with all of your units. This could have been so much easier, but this control made the battle a bit frustrating.
Another minor issue is with the map on the bottom screen during combat. You can see the entire field with your screen view in a little yellow box. Tapping the screen moves to another point on the map. That’s great, but one thing that you can’t do is tap and slide the stylus (or finger) to slide the camera around. You have to clumbsily tap the screen multiple times, which makes your view jump around. It’s a bit disorienting and, along with the frustating unit selecting function, makes things harder.
I would have much prefered the exact inverse controls. Switch the action to the bottom screen, have the selecting of units done entirely with the touch screen, and used the circle pad to fluidly (and flawlessly) move the camera around. THAT would have been a truly intuitive control setup.
But aside from these control issues, if you enjoy tower defense games this is a pretty fun title. The game has good music, the AI is pretty good and visually the game looks solid.
