Vector TD 2

Play Vector TD 2 by clicking here

 The essence of a tower defence game is simple: There’s a playing field with an entry on one side and an exit on the other. Various bad things appear at the entrance and head towards the exit and it’s up to you to stop them, which you do by buying weapons and placing them on the field. Each bad thing you blow to pieces earns you some money/credits/whatever, which you can use to buy more weapons or upgrade the ones you have. The game ends when a specified number of bad things have managed to run the gauntlet past your defences and escape the playing field.

Because this is such a simple recipe there are a lot of similar titles out there, so deciding which one to spend time playing often comes down to the subtle differences between them. My current favourite is Vector TD 2. What makes this title stand out for me is a combination of the very clean and stylish retro vector graphics, how it adds a level of sophistication above your typical tower defence game without becoming too complicated.

VTD2 offers four game modes – Normal, Time Attack, Lightning, and Puzzle/Sandbox – and six selectable maps, and the player can choose any combination of game mode and map from the start. Normal mode grants you a small amount of money to get started, and throws the enemies (known as vectoids) at you in waves, Time attack gives you fewer lives and sends a constant stream of vectoids until you succumb to the onslaught, Lightning is like normal mode but runs at twice the speed, and Puzzle/Sandbox gives you $50,000 to spend on defences and two free bonuses but no opportunity to earn money from your kills.

Bonuses? That’s one of the little additions that makes VTD2 interesting. There are four bonuses on offer: Damage booster, Range Booster, Interest Increase and Panic. The booster bonuses increase the ability of any weapon placed within a few map squares of them, making careful placement essential as weapons can’t be moved once deployed, the Interest Increase bonus is like changing to a better bank account in that it earns extra money based on the amount left in your account between waves of Vectoids, and the Panic bonus buys you five extra lives. In order to buy bonuses you have to spend bonus points rather than your hard earned cash, and as you only earn these by destroying a rare type of vectoid that’s usually accompanied by a wave of super-tough ones, it’s important not to waste them.

The weapons in VTD2 are fairly standard, but the way they work adds a further tactical edge to the game. Each group of weapons does more damage to vectoids that match the colour of that group, and only inflict half damage to vectoids of the opposite colour – eg. A red laser will give a damage boost of 150% against red spinner vectoids, but will only do 50% against green flyers. Given that the weapons types work in very different ways, there’s a balance to be struck between targeting particular types of vectoids and providing a balanced defence. This is also complicated by advanced vectoids that don’t match any of the colours, and take whatever you can throw at them. You can also instruct each of your weapons to fire at the closest, strongest or weakest vectoids so you can adjust their behaviour throughout the level based on where they’re placed and how well things are going.

I won’t go into the differences between the weapon types as finding that out is part of the fun, but I would suggest you play around with the sandbox mode in order to discover which style of weapon fits best with your tactics, and what effect they all have on different vectoids.

VTD2 is a little gem, and will quite probably take up far more of your time that you intended. Give it a go.