The Average Gamer

Defenders of Ardania Review (PC)

You know that feeling when there’s just too much going on in a game and you fear a cerebral explosion may be imminent? Well Defenders of Ardania from Most Wanted Entertainment and Paradox Interactive veers wildly between your brain just giving up and oozing from your ears and mindless button-clicky tedium. The game is based on the standard tower defence mechanic of frantic base protection as waves of incoming baddies surge towards you but with a strategic twist of… attacking at the same time. Set in the already established world of Majesty, your job is to: build towers, research unit and economic upgrades, level up your armies and fling spells around, all whilst listening to possibly the worst Sean Connery impression I’ve ever heard.

It all starts promisingly. It’s a pretty game and the tutorials (whilst deeply annoying thanks to faux Connery) are excellent at explaining which tower trumps which unit, what you’re supposed to be doing with the funny glowing squares and how to expand your arsenal via the research options.

Each level starts off with a frantic rush to get towers up, these will protect your base and expand your field of control ultimately allowing you to snag the precious resource tiles that are dotted about the map.

Towers, units and resource amounts are all capped, although upgradeable, so it’s just a case of keeping everything at maximum while playing a war of attrition with your opponent(s). You’ll have to send wave after wave after wave after wave of your minions and it’s oh so easy to completely forget about dispatching any in the heat of a panic brought on by your defences being toppled.

Then once things have settled down, you can spend a long old time staring at the map just waiting for your units to be killed off so you can mindlessly send some more across. Sadly, as you progress through the single-player campaign things don’t get better. You get a wider variety of units and towers but the difficulty of each level becomes more unbalanced till eventually I just gave up. There’s not enough time in this world to spend it being soundly beaten by fly-infested towers or rampaging bears.

Thankfully the multiplayer option is considerably more fun to play thanks to natural human rivalry and a lack of AI balancing woes. Available over Steam it’s easy enough to get a server established and jump in to the action.

There’s a lobby available for you to hook up with randoms but, having spent the last week checking this at different times, it’s not busy enough to be a viable option so you’ll need to recruit some friends to join in. You’ll be able to choose from the three races and the full range of game maps. With co-operative and versus modes available (if you have more than two players) this part of the game would be worth picking the title up for if you fancy a bit of a change from the standard tower defence offerings and have a willing team.

Available from Steam for £9.99 I’d wince a little at recommending it unless you were sure you’d get some multi-player action. If you’re not sure whether it’s for you then it’d be worth taking a look at the demo before making a purchase.

Defenders of Ardania is out now on Steam and PC retail. Mat Jones was less impressed by the iOS version.

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