Alien Creeps TD is, on first glance, another really well presented Tower Defence game that any fan of the genre would be happy to have in their collection.
The game maps, characters and weapons are certainly well desinged and a joy to watch as aliens come trundling and flying down the map towards your heavily outnumbered troops. Â Graphically, the game is up there with the best.
After a short couple of tutorial levels it’s down to business and you’ll gather more weapons and upgrades as you progress, collecting coins to pay for them and gems to help you research faster and restock the tesla tower that appears in the middle of each map, giving you 3 shots before requiring more gems to recharge.
Coins and gems make up the monetary units of the game and are required to get pretty much anywhere, but they do take a lot of grinding. Â The game is Freemium, so some concession should be given for this, but there’s a price to pay, quite literally, when a developer makes a Freemium game that isn’t quite as balanced as it should be. Â Yes, there is a special mission mode that lets you gamble on being able to finish up to 5 missions for ever increasing rewards and this certainly helps to build coins and resources up, but it’s not enough.
Whichever side of the Freemium fence you sit on, the one thing that a developer really has to get right is where to draw the line between the constant need to ‘top up’ with cash in order to continue or just spend time grinding.
Alien Creeps TD got it wrong when it first launched in that, within a few hours of play, it becomes impossible to pass without most of your towers needing a few stages of upgrades. Â Now some of this will have been completed in previous maps, but there’s a wall that I hit which either requires days of replaying the levels I’ve mastered or paying up for coins to upgrade.
The later updates, thankfully,fixed this and balanced things perfectly, though there’s still a wait for new upgrades and bonus airstrikes, but it now feels justified and crystals can be earned fairly easily in order to speed these up or upgrade your heroes.
The new Challenges which were added to the game a few months back are more consistant, too, though I really hope the developer is planning to add more of these in a future update, alongside some resolution or continuation to the story.
Overall and with the balancing now in place, Alien Creeps TD is easy to recommend as one of the best Tower Defence games out there on mobile. Â Both the iOS and Android games are well worth picking up for fans of the genre and those new to it.
(score revised as of April 2015)
Alien Creeps TD
Pros
- Well designed courses
- plenty of upgrade options
- nicely detailed enemies
Cons
- can be a grind at times to get upgrades
