Genre: Tower Defense
Developer: Moonlight Mouse
Price: £3.99
Ancient planet seems like a solid, well-designed tower defense game until about 8 levels in, at which point your base is utterly flattened by a massive horde of self-healing robots. From that point the designers’ intent becomes apparent; Ancient Planet is a grindfest designed to alleviate mobile phone gamers of their hard earned cash through gratuitous microtransactions, and yet which wasn’t in any way rebalanced when he game transitioned to PC last year.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Ancient planet is a tower defense game, which means it’s a type of real-time strategy game in which the player must place towers alongside a road. These towers attack enemies, different towers have different abilities, enemies drop loot that can be used to upgrade towers and so on and so forth. The difference between Ancient Planet and traditional tower defense is that between missions players can upgrade the abilities of their towers using gem points, which are a tertiary currency earned through the completion of levels without spending all of their gold coins (the secondary currency) on factories that produce silver (the primary currency) to build towers with. Whilst this initially seems to allow for some degree of customisation, it quickly becomes apparent that you need ALL of the upgrades, and yet only have the gems for a few of them.
And so the only way to continue the game is to go back to the first few levels and mindlessly play them over and over again, hoping that the random number gods drop more than a handful of gold coins each time. You’ll need a few hundred of those gems, so it could take you a while to make any actual progress. As you can imagine, this rather sucks any of the fun out of the game and, let us face it, if tower defense game isn’t fun, then what’s the point in playing it at all?
Which is a shame, because if it were, there would be a lot to recommend the game on; it’s got great painting-style graphics, a very clean design that includes colour coding and some surprisingly decent animation. The levels, the first time around at least, are actually vaguely fun and likable. Sadly, most of the game is entirely pointless grind, so who cares? Moving on. Next game.
How long did I play? - 2.5 hours
Did I finish it? - No
Would I play it again? - No
