Star Wars: Battle for Hoth Review

Star Wars: Battle for Hoth by THQ is almost a perfect storm of nerdy ideas. Lets run the list: Star Wars? Check. Tower Defense? Check. Situated on Hoth? Check. I mean, just how can this go wrong?

Those familiar with tower defense titles won't be too surprised by the basic controls and gameplay of Battle for Hoth, with units slowly being added to your roster as you progress through the main campaign to highlight their use and importance in your arsenal. In a small twist, these 'towers' can all be directly attacked, which makes the use of trenches or place buildings on strategic high-spots a pivotal strategy to master. These trenches not only block the path of units but also provide a minor defense bonus to some of your units. Another positive addition is the ability to assign individual or global prioritization for each tower, giving players a lot of strategic control.

While many of the units are easily recogniseable, the artwork isn't as sharp as you'd expect and the animations are kept to a dreary minimum. It would be easy enough to forgive the visual direction if placement of units wasn't also oddly archaic, with players needing to use an notoriously innacurate method of positioning towers underneath their finger. The AI is also wickedly easy to exploit as cheap sacrificial units can be placed to distract the enemy away from deadlier expensive towers.

For the most part the good outweighs the bad and Battle for Hoth is a still a fun tower defense title, however we can't but feel this isn't the game we've been looking for.