Eridani
Click to enlarge
Eridani has a lot going for it. It could be described as a 'space based' RTS. You get to build your base 'round the edges of planets' it says in the description, and what it means by this is that the 2D planets offer some nice circular real-estate for you to develop. There are bases and laser turrets, mines and energy plants, various things for you to play with while building up your army of drones. Some drones mine resources from asteroids and let you build all the various paraphernalia that goes along with war. You will probably find a good excuse to build the missile silos and construct fleets of battle ships.
Click to enlarge
It's all incredibly fun, especially the missile part. These can be from the planet's surface and can do some serious damage. You won't need a death star, put it that way. Apparently there's a 'Skirmish Mode' but we didn't try it so can't comment, but it promises instant action.
One thing that was a drag about this game was the speed the ships move. It is probable that ship speeds improve with various technology discoveries and upgrades, but that doesn't help much when you're waiting for your ships to meander across the game grid like Wordsworth's Sister's famous cloud (I wandered lonely as a cloud over vales and hills). And believe us when we say they meander. They meander as if they are taking nice holiday snaps of the solar system on the way past. Another gripe is controlling them. No matter how specific you are with regards to where you want them... one of your ships or more will somehow always manage to auto-route itself in the exact opposite direction, but only if there's a good strong enemy turret waiting to blow it up.
Click to enlarge
These niggles aside, the game is awesome! The depth alone gives it a leg up in terms of playability. It's always nice to see flash games that involve players more. The graphics are very good--of course it's space and space isn't exactly the hardest thing in the world to depict--lots of black and the like. In this case the developers have gone for a green nebula look to the background. The planets, ships, buildings are all nicely done. They not only look good, but are smooth to control (mostly). Placement of buildings is pretty cool--it's fun to get to slide the placer around the planet to pick a spot. The pacing of the game is alright, could have been a little faster at times, but only requiring minor tweaking. If you decide to play it, best to set aside a good half an hour so you can properly get into it - 10 minutes won't be enough in this case. Enjoy!
Mini Tower Defence
Click to enlarge
There are so many different tower defense games it's hard to tell between them. Mini Tower Defence [yes, it uses the british spelling but we use the US spelling] is one of the more entertaining tower defense games out there.
The quality of the workmanship in the game shows right away, and the graphics offer stylistic retro futuristic look (think 8-bit era games set in the future) while maintaining a modern overall feel.
Click to enlarge
Despite the abundance of high quality art in the game, it doesn't slow it down much, and never gets as laggy as other TD games out there. Because it’s not as prone to freezing, playing it remains a joy, even when you have the screen filled with turrets and bullets.Even at the later levels our 1 year old test laptop handled the levels fairly smoothly, despite being under-powered by usual gaming machine standards. Of course, we wouldn't recommend doing too much on your machine at the same time. The upgrade options are one of the best features in the game. Not only are all the towers upgradable through several levels in game, but between levels there his another entirely different aspect to upgrades where you can tweak things like the cost of the towers, the starting money, the overall damage the towers do and so on. The number of points you can throw into these upgrades, which cost increasingly more points every level depends on your performance in the game - namely your score. This offers a good reason to aim for higher score, or go back and replay levels. Also if you get stuck you can go back to previous levels and redo them for more points, letting you upgrade some more to help you with the level you’re stuck on. In addition, if you get the close to the highest score possible for a level, you're awarded double the points towards upgrades.
Click to enlarge
The way the game has been split into levels adds lots of variety and fun. You won’t grow bored with it easily anyway. Another good thing about the levels is the variety it adds to the game. The different shaped layouts you encounter each level cause you to have to rethink your tactics since some strategies will work better than others across the various different layouts. This factor is certainly the thing that helps this game appeal to the strategists out there. Unlike many tower defense games, there's enough variety to offer a number of solutions to any problem, while at the same time being a tough nut to crack. It also a has lots of baddies and lots of guns, enough to appeal to anyone! This was a clear choice when choosing the game to spotlight today. Remember and check out mini tower defence.
