iBomber Defense Pacific Review

By , on March 5, 2012


iBomber Defense Pacific
Download on the AppStore
4 out of 5

PROS

  • A simple and elegant tower defense experience.
  • The upgrade curve is well mapped out.
  • More emphasis on strategic placement of towers (and what types to place).

CONS

  • Can become difficult early on for those unfamiliar with the genre.

VERDICT

A strategic tower defense game set during wartime. Lots of variety and a well balanced upgrade curve. Easy to recommend for tower defense fans.


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And the tower defense games just keep on coming! It's hard to be completely cynical about gross over-saturation of a genre when a developer does such a good job of creating an entry into said genre. Not only that but this is a sequel to iBomber Defense which was a pretty solid tower defense title to begin with. As the name suggests, battle now is primarily on the Pacific rim, and while that gives a lot of opportunity for battleships to attack beach-heads or enemies to float upstream, there's a great variety of not only grassland areas, but urban environments too.

If you've played a tower defense game before, you'll feel right at home here. The landscape has predetermined placement for towers but this is far from limiting, as in many levels the enemy will attack from multiple areas, and then the difficulty becomes a balance of covering the map but also not spreading your forces too thin. Towers can be upgraded and they can dig in, which increases their defense and range. The enemies attack your towers so money needs to be spent on repairing them as well, although this is usually a paltry amount (depending on how many towers you have in harm's way).

In-between levels you get to use the points acquired based on your performance to unlock upgrades of new towers once they're introduced. The upgrades allow you to funnily enough, upgrade the towers during battle. What's nice to see is that the upgrading doesn't feel grind heavy, but instead a good balance has been achieved with almost each level completed allowing you to boost your power in some way. To help this along are the secondary objectives in each mission. They usually divert your attention from the incoming waves, but they can indeed net you some worthwhile points so this becomes a great example of risk versus reward.

So with a solid core, a perk system to add to the upgrading fun and impressive top down visuals, tower defense fans should find yet another title to waste their hours with tower placement and resource management. An easy recommend for fans of the genre.

Screenshots

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