Vector Tower Defense
Web-based Flash game

Gameplay is the thing.

If a computer game isn't actually fun to play more than once, it can be fully three dimensional and have true-to-life sound, and it's still a miserable experience; imagine a game that perfectly replicated waiting for your car to be serviced. But if the gameplay is good, you can have the ASCII graphics of Nethack and cultivate life-long fans.

Vector Tower Defense is a free new Flash game (generously sponsored by Orbit gum) that manages to combine some of the strategy of Go with the antique digital flash of Missile Command. Cutting edge graphics? Absolutely not. Gameplay? Hell yes.

The game is a computerized Running of the Bulls, except the bulls are geometric robots, and instead of running alongside them, you try to kill them with projectiles. But rather than being a click 'n slay free-for-all, VTD lets the player set up heavily-armed towers, stand back, and watch the Vectoids run the gauntlet. Every 'bot that survives to complete the course claims one of your lives, and wraps around to the begining of the track for a victory lap.

Each tower has unique properties. There are stun towers that slow down the robots, rocket towers that fire incredibly damaging projectiles, and laser towers that slowly wear down nearby opponents. And all of them can be upgraded within their model type or superceded by better models.

At the game's outset, even the weakest tower can mow down scads of Vectoids without breaking a sweat. Thirty or 40 levels later, four or five supercharged towers can wail on a single baddie for dozens of shots before it falls. In the interim, you have hopefully created a Running Man-style gauntlet of kill zones that will whittle your robotic opponents down to ashes by the end of the course.

The driving engine of the game is money. Kill a baddie, collect a bounty. Spend your bounty, and build an empire of overlapping kill zones. Strategic placement of range and damage-enhancing bonuses can mean the difference between a tough but vulnerable defense and a deadly quagmire for the charging 'bots. Likewise, it's critical to take advantage of switchbacks and central locations that allow towers to smite the enemy both coming, and going. And the limited amount of cash on hand forces decisions: more little towers to slow down the pace of the bots? Saving up for another giant rocket-slinging emplacement? A bank of lasers to wear down everybody for the coup-de-gras offered a little further down the road?

And while the game seems easy at the outset, it's very easy to get overconfident, particularly on the more craftily-shaped maps. Striking the right balance of kill zones, stun rays and upgrades (versus buying new towers) can be difficult, and it's initially demoralizing when a bank of yellow sprinters barrels through what you thought was an unstoppable wall of lasers in order to end the game. If you play the game and it initially seems too easy, give it time; if it eventually seems unbeatable, regroup and try another strategy. There are plenty to choose from.

That the game is fun to play is of the essence; that it's beautiful is icing on the cake. VTD cultivates a Tron aesthetic. Graphics are smooth and geometic, pulsing in the electric blues, greens and reds that made the space within Tron's computer such a cartoonishly convincing make-believe universe.

It's no God of War II, but that doesn't mean that you can't kill an afternoon or three kicking around its virtual battlegrounds.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)