This is the latest game of the month title that will also feature in the release of the next Indie Heroes Collection, and I’m pleased to say this is a good game that once I picked up, I couldn’t stop playing until it was beaten!
So as with all Evercade Game of the Month titles, this is a game which you can download onto you Evercade EXP or Evercade VS and play completely for free until you next update your system. And this game was originally designed for the Game Boy Advance, and is also available for that console, either as a download to use on flash carts on your PC or emulation device of choice, or you can also get a physical cartridge.
Collie Defense is a tower defence game, and this has always been a genre I have enjoyed, but never played enough of. This game is short, but certainly will be a highlight of the Evercade Indie Heroes release when it is packaged along side a bunch of other games. As a standalone Game Boy Advance game, it is quite short, so may not have quite enough jelly in there for some players, but will be fun for fans of indie games.
In the game, you play as a Collie dog called Whisky, which from my quick glance at the game’s kickstarter page I think is probably based on the developer’s own dog. Good for you! There should be more dogs turned into gaming characters.
In the game you have to play as this dog with the mission of protecting all the sheep from the likes of foxes, bears, and other animals which I assume are cats and other things…maybe.
But here is where one thing about the game is strange. You don’t actually see the dog you’re controlling, and the predator animals never actually go over to the sheep you’re protecting. I really think a little more could have been done to connect the concept of the story to what actually happens. But story schmory, I did enjoy the game and that is far more important.
In the game, you have single screen levels where the enemy animals will enter the screen and walk along set paths, and you have to choose one of four types of towers to place somewhere on the screen using a grid system to strategically shoot the enemy animals. Yeah, this Collie dog sets towers with gunmen in them. You have a limited amount of cash and the towers have different stats for their firing speed, power and range.
For every enemy you kill you will get extra cash, and the game is all about getting the towers in place as quickly as possible so they can do the max damage to the enemies before they can exit the screen from the set path they are walking along.
The game only has twelve levels which is much too short. From what I read the game was made in a game jam, and later fleshed out but think it should have been fleshed out more to really shine.
The levels do get progressively harder and the last couple are a real challenge, which was great and is exactly what I want from a tower defense game. I want it to feel like a slog of quick decision making and keeping you eyes on all the areas of attack.
The enemies will quickly start entering the screen from different areas and this is where you have to be strategic about which towers are best placed where to have the most range and do the most damage. But…as much as I like the game, the truth is, I beat the entire game just using the weakest gun. As is usually the case with this type of game, you can have the most of the weakest weapon as it costs the least to use, and you can then just spam it to win. Literally by the time I beat the final level, the game wouldn’t let me place any more on the stage even though there was space and I had cash. I think either there is a limit to how many active towers you can have or the game simply couldn’t handle more. I didn’t experience any slowdown though.
Perhaps the thing that adds most challenge to the game is that you only really have once chance to beat the entire game. Certainly on Evercade you can use save states if you want, and by pausing the game you can restart a level as many times as you want, but there are two aspects that really add extra challenge to the experience. Firstly, you have three hearts for your health and you lose a little any time an enemy animal makes it to the exit. This will carry over to the next level so it means you only have three hearts to make it through the whole twelve levels. And secondly, the amount of cash you have for the towers also carries over from one level to the next. This means the less towers you use earlier on, but still kill all the enemies, the easier the game will be later on. Again, this is why it’s best to just use the most basic tower to save cash.
One down thing from this is that you may find the game becomes unwinnable at a later level if you don’t have enough cash or hearts to possibly beat the next level. I only realised this situation when I was only maybe level seven or eight and started a level with just five bucks and couldn’t even place one tower. I had to restart the game from scratch and then used as few towers as possible and was pretty over powered right until the penultimate level.
The penultimate level is interesting as I’m sure if you played a perfect game up until this point you could defeat all the four bears that enter as soon as the level starts, but after a few tries I realised rather than try to defeat all four bears and fail to defeat them all, I could concentrate my towers on just three and then only take a little damage whilst earning the cash for defeating three of the four bears which enabled me to get through the rest of the level.
So far, of the Evercade game of the month titles for 2024, this may be my favourite, although for full transparency, I didn’t get to play the Jayne Austen one from the previous month as every time I tried to update my Evercade VS the system would crash…
I’d like to see a sequel to this game, and have it have more content, and I’d like to see animation of the dog character run around the screen to place the towers, and maybe instead of having the enemies just exit, maybe there could be sheep at the end point they reach that could diminish instead of just hearts for the health bar.
