These are fairly simple tests of light resource management and endurance vs. Baghdad Mayhem (and the longer, more difficult Baghdad Mayhem Rearmed) offer an all-or-nothing randomly generated streak of waves with a time limit and generators that must be destroyed. Though the campaign is short, there are some ways to extend the experience. Yes, they are a huge pain in the ass, but they can be countered by placing power-ups behind buildings out of sight. Energizers scan the field with a precision laser and, rather than attacking the commander, will suck up any power-ups deployed and send out a pulse that restores all destroyed towers in range of the blast. Hackers hit the battlefield with a bubble that, if you're inside, will force your units to fire on you rather than enemy targets - even those in range. At about the halfway point in the single-player campaign (there’s nothing online to be found here save for leaderboards), two major towers are introduced that mix things up: the Hacker and Energizer. It's an interesting take on things, and though it's not as deeply strategic as other tower defense games with their pre-set ideal order and placement of towers, it's also plenty challenging in its own right. This means players are constantly running around picking up additional ability uses dropped by plane after destroying towers or hitting a checkpoint, but they're also the squad's lifeline, and must stay near to deploy beneficial means of masking, healing and distracting at all times. You as the commander have the ability to pull up a tactical map at any time with Triangle, allowing for quick re-routes at street intersections, and the ability to call down special abilities to Repair, Smoke Screen, Decoy, and Bomb in area effect radials. This is an offensive game, and most of the normal busy work of picking up collectibles or upgrading towers instead becomes a matter of strategically deploying power-ups in the field. What's interesting here is how well 11 bit has side-stepped a lot of the tower defense tropes. Shield units that will wrap protection around friendlies in front and behind of it while snaking through a level, a Supply carrier that soaks up energy from destroyed towers to generate new power-ups (more on those in a second), and a Chainer that pulls energy from standing towers to blast out a chain-linked attack on any in range round things out. Tanks and APCs, for instance, have plenty of health, but can't match the full firepower of the rocket-launching Crawlers or the twin-flame cannon of the Dragon. Instead, your units have varying levels of attack and defense, and can be upgraded individually up to three times, boosting those base stats. In other words, no one unit is especially adept at taking on a particular tower. As the levels progress, more allied units are introduced to offset some of the newer, more powerful enemy towers, but this isn't really a rock/paper/scissors setup like other tower defense entries. Rather than sending out attacking units, the mysterious antagonists seem keen to just place a crapload of different tower types all around a set of a dozen or so levels taking place in Baghdad and Toyko. The "invasion" takes on an oddly defensive tactic right from the get-go, though. This is, after all, an alien invasion game. Interestingly, the grammar seems to swap back and forth between the Queen's English and American (I don't believe I've ever heard a Brit use "ain't" in seriousness), but it's meant to be cheesy. Play The "story" isn't really much more than an introductory cinematic (that looks rather fancy, I might add) and a bunch of in-mission updates from a goofily voiced set of voice actors from the UK.
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