The game I played most this week: Resco Defender

Action: Resco Defender

I like this kind of thinking: take the typical model for the RTS game, and remove the parts that some people (i.e., me) find irritating: generating and protecting resources, waiting for structures to be built, having to explore and conquer lots of territory, and a few other things.

To put it more plainly: Resco Defender focuses on defending your base against hoards of enemy attackers and strips away all the non-essential stuff. What's left is a game where you continually build defensive structures to stop the hoard from getting to your base. 

Resco Defender has a fairly interesting setup. The key parts of your base are at the bottom half of the screen. The rest of the screen is where the action occurs:  the ten available towers are built instantly and can be placed pretty much anywhere on the game screen. The only limitation is money, which you earn by killing enemies (you get a small purse at the beginning of the game for building purposes).

Levels run together continuously, meaning that you don't start over each time. (One interesting feature the game has allows you to skip one or more levels by pushing a button at the bottom right of the screen. Want to die really fast?  Try hitting the button a few times.) 

RTS games were originally devised as a way of making strategy more action-oriented than the usual turn-based hex model that computer games were using up until the early 90s. Strategy and arcade tend to have very different play styles, and this type of game always runs the risk of dipping too much into the arcade category. Like a few other action-based RTS games, RD gets a bit repetitive at times as you're fighting off endless hoards of enemies (there's even a game mode called "endless.")

That's not really a limitation, per se, just a reality as you remove most of the strategy from a game concept that's really meant to be strategic. RD's graphics, while VGA-enabled, are pretty crude--many of the enemies are just blobs. This lack of graphical detail doesn't really help the game's relative lack of depth.  

Those who are more strategy-minded will probably want to pass it by. As someone who's not fond of RTS games, I like the idea of these action-based hybrids, but it’s time for them to evolve a bit.

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Allen Gall's The Week in Games  Copyright © 2007 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.