Sentinel 2 : Earth Defense - Review
Sentinel 2 : Earth Defense
Not Another Tower Defense Game
In Sentinel 2 : Earth Defense, the fate of earth depends on you defending it from the invading horde of aliens. The second installment of this game comes after the first edition where you defended Mars, a mining colony but now the aliens are striking at our home planet Earth. Sentinel 2 : Earth Defense comes from the same folks over at Origin8 who also bought us the first version of the Sentinel : Mars Defense. This time however the game as well as the gameplay has been much more interesting than the previous version. Let’s take a look at what makes Sentinel 2 such a worthy buy.
Gameplay Design (4 out of 5)
The gameplay levels are all well designed and fun to play. You have an arsenal of powerful tower defense weapons at your disposal which makes for awesome gameplay. There are some exciting additions to weaponry too, now you have ship-based weapons which launch attacks from space and make mince meat out of invading aliens. The towers can now be repaired with hovering repair bots, which seems to be important at later levels when the gameplay gets petty intense. The repair bots also keep your ship-based weapons in good condition and charged up to fire upon request. Also available are new booster towers which increase the power of the existing tower defenses. The classic pinch and other finger gestures allow you to zoom into the area of action to see the carnage at close quarters. You can feel the advantage this offers when you can watch the invading aliens wiped out at close quarters by say an air-strike that you called for or bombardment from orbital weapons.
Sentinel 2 : Earth Defense
Features & Gameplay (4 out of 5)
Interesting additions to this version of the game is ability to share your scores over OpenFeint which also brings in the ability to chat with friends and show off your achievements. In fact the OpenFeint system tries to replicate sort of the Xbox 360 & PS3 online counterparts that add so much value to the games and gameplay. Yet another addition to the game is the need to harvest resources to have the gears of war moving. This feature of the gameplay is somewhat new to the tower defense genre, though if you’ve played games like Command & Conquer, you would be familiar with the concept. Though the resource harvesting features are not very significant parts of the gameplay they nevertheless influence the game to some extent. My opinion is that it is a refreshing addition to the otherwise monotony of the Tower defense genre. The game saves the game progress automatically when you quit and you can always pick up the battle where you left it. This is a often required but forgotten feature in several games since most users play games like these at short intervals like waiting for the bus, standing in line at a McDonalds, etc.
Verdict
Providing refreshing new music, hours of interesting gameplay via. the Campaign and Endurance mode, smooth gameplay and realistic graphics make Sentinel 2 : Earth Defense well worth the time and investment of $ 2.99, and saves us from the hundred other “me too” tower defense clones.
