Tower defense games are easily one of my favorite subgenres of the strategy genre. And you don’t have to try very hard to find them out there, whether it be on your phone, PC or even consoles. Especially on phones, as it seems every other game released lately that isn’t a match-3 is a tower defense title. So what makes Guns’N’Glory stand out from the pack?
For starters, you’re not saving the planet or participating in World War III or anything like that. You’re actually, believe it or not, playing the bad guys. You control a group of bandits in a Wild West setting. You’re ambushing common, every-day innocent settlers just trying to make their way west to strike it rich, as people tended to do back in the Wild West. The more you kill, the more gold you gather to recruit additional bandits and desperados to your team. As if life on the trail in the wild west, fighting off wild animals and dysentery, wasn’t bad enough, now these settlers have to deal with getting mowed down by a gun, dynamite and flaming arrow wielding army of bad guys.
Another great difference between Guns’N’Glory and your ‘typical’ tower defense title is well, the lack of towers. I’ll let that sink in for a minute… A tower defense game with no towers… I know, wacky huh? But it works! Instead of towers, you have individual people, ranging from a standard revolver wielding bandit to dynamite tossing desperados to flaming arrow shooting Indians. You also get cannons, railcar mounted Gatling guns and a couple other unit types. But they’re all mobile. A big part of the whole strategy is moving your “towers” from one part of the path to another as the settlers move along the canyon. Most of the maps will have multiple entrance points, each of which may or may not be active during each wave, so it’s crucial to pay attention to where people are coming from and where they’re heading and reposition your troops accordingly.
As each map starts, all of the assorted troops are asleep around the map except maybe the one or two you start with. As you ambush kill all the innocent settlers trying to make their way through the canyon, you can spend the money you loot from them to wake up additional troops. Also scattered around the map are assorted chests containing cash and different power-ups. As you progress through the levels, you eventually gain the ability to upgrade your units, making them more powerful. So then you have to decide whether to buy new troops or upgrade existing ones, basically the difference between a small force of high powered troops, and a large force of weaker bandits. Either strategy can be effective, depending on the layout of the map you’re playing.
According to the Guns’N’Glory website, Handy Games has made significant updates to the game since it has launched. They’ve quadrupled the number of levels, from 10 to 40, added new units and items and made several performance tweaks. The current version of the game is supposed to be 1.5.4, but if you get the game through Amazon’s App Store like I did, you get version is 1.4.2. Also, I was unable to find the paid version through Amazon’s app store. Both are available directly from the Android Market though. Supposedly the only difference between the paid version and the free is the free contains ads, as stated on the Handy Games website: “The free version is using ads. That is the only difference between that version and the ad-free ("full") version! The ads are necessary to ensure that the hard working people that made this game possible are getting paid for their effort. If you find the ads disturbing you can still buy the ad-free version.” I didn’t find the ads all that annoying personally, but I liked the game enough that I bought the ad-free version to support the developers, and to get the fully updated copy of the game.
As for faults/bugs/etc with the game, I really didn’t experience much to speak of. There are some folks out there complaining about the “offensiveness” of the game, but I really didn’t take any notice or offense with it. Sure, it’s a bit stereotypical with the Indians calling you a paleface and such, but it really wasn’t anything to make a big deal about. After many hours of playing I never had a single crash or freeze. Loading times were actually amazingly fast for a phone game. About the only complaint I can make is that things can get a little hectic at times when you’re dealing with a large map with three entrance points, tons of troops all over the place that you’re trying to move around and upgrade, etc. That and it’s not really the type of game you can whip out and play for only a couple minutes while you’re waiting in line at the store. Levels tend to be long, taking a good bit of time to play between checkpoints. But all told, I would gladly pay FAR more for this game than I did, it’s great fun and I highly recommend it. And given that you can get the full game for free, there’s no risk in giving it a spin.
Pros:
Fun twists on the Tower Defense game style.
Huge amount of content.
Developers very active with constant updates to add content and fix issues.
Option of either an ad-free paid version or ad-supported free version without sacrificing any of the content in the game itself.
Cons:
Can get a bit hectic and overwhelming for some people, especially on a smaller screen.
Not really the type of game you can whip out and play for just a couple minutes here and there.
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