Overview
Crystal Defenders is a Final Fantasy-themed tower defense game for the iPhone. Tower defense games involve players placing buildings or characters around a road. Bad guys traverse the road, and the goal is to build your defenses in such a way that nobody can get through. Enemies come in varying types, so an adaptable defense is key. Crystal Defenders reskins the experience with Black Mages instead of missile turrets, and classic Final Fantasy enemies in place of generic soldiers or aliens.
Features
Most of the production values are pretty high here. The music is great, the menus are beautiful, and the various character classes are distinct enough to tell them apart.
Squeenix opted to cut the screen into halves and place a giant trackball looking thing on one of ‘em. Most of the controlling can be done from this trackball, with a touch to the center acting as a confirm button. This interface works in some ways, and frustrates me in others. I’ll discuss in detail further down the page.
Crystal Defender’s battlefields are split up into three worlds, each with a different level of complexity. The first serves as a training ground with extra tips to get players used to it, and you’ll work your way up to the third where all options are on the table.
Like most Final Fantasy games, players could spend hours mastering every intricacy of the strategy for this game. Each world comes with four maps for a total of 12, so there’s definitely a lot to do here.
Breakdown
The Good:
As Square-Enix’s first venture onto the iPhone scene, fans are no doubt excited and nervous about how it has turned out. I am pleased to report that the Final Fantasy and Tower Defense crossover crowd will be extremely happy with this game. Being a member of that crowd, I felt the same way. The actual action works well and as in any good tower defense game, placement is critical. Watching legions of lovingly-remembered characters tear through hordes of lovingly-remembered enemies was just plain satisfying.
So for just the tower defense crowd? This game is solid, and offers a more-than-average number of options for constructing your ultimate defense. All the regular bases like direct-damage, area-of-effect, and slow are covered, while variations on those give you nuanced control over what kind of damage you’re doing and where. You can also place power crystals to grant buffs to nearby characters, adding a whole other level of strategy.
I felt like the difficulty scaling and pacing were spot on. Progressing through one battle at world 1 and one at world 2, I didn’t feel overwhelmed at all when arriving at world 3. Even better, all three worlds are open from the beginning, so if you feel like jumping straight into the hardest level, you’re welcome to. Once you get used to the controls, they’re usable enough, and after getting over that hurdle this game was a blast.
The Bad:
There is a giant orb taking away half of my screen. I took a look at screenshots and was immediately dismayed at this design choice. We know that full screen touch controls are possible, so doing it like this just doesn’t make a lot of sense. There was a “view” mode that I could access by tilting the phone sideways, but no controls were available in this mode. I seriously hope that this issue is addressed in an update. I'd like to score the game a 4.5 or so, but can't do that in good conscience with this control scheme in place.
Full vs. Free:
Crystal Defenders Lite is available for free. This downsized version gives you World 1 only. This is a good way to decide if you’ll enjoy the gameplay, and since the full version costs 8 bucks, it’s a good idea to try before you buy.
Verdict
I loved this game even though the control design was maddening. I moved past it, developed techniques to make the gameplay feel close enough to fluid, and had some fun. Fans of Final Fantasy will buy this game whether I tell them to or not. Tower defense junkies should definitely check out the free version and then go on for a buy unless you for some reason don’t enjoy yourself. Regular/casual iPhone gamers? This might be a little too complex for your tastes, so check out the free version before spending the dough.
