Tiamatini

In a flurry of productivity here’s another potentially good buy for you this evening…  I was mistakenly guided here thinking this was an RPG, and hunting for something with dragons given my recent love affair with Dragon Age: Origins (review of the DLCs coming soon… ish…) and was, if I’m honest, disappointed on both counts, but fortunately I was pleasantly surprised with the reality of the game, so read on to see if it could be the pleasant surprise you’re hunting for too…

Dragon Slaughter is essentially a tower defence game, with a bit of a built in storyline.  You have to pass through the various levels, and defeat the variety of skeletons, zombies, dragons and spiders (yes, spiders, far too realistic for my liking – tower defence games are hard with your eyes closed) to progress and ultimately win the game.  As you might expect, you need to build towers in strategic locations which fire at the advancing enemy.  For each one you kill,  you get some money, money means more towers or, more importantly, tower upgrades – the more powerful your towers, the more damage they do.  However, Dragon Slaughter has the added bonus of being able to modify your towers to change the damage and/or rewards for each tower.  In order to do this you add magic stones of varying colours to each tower, up to 3 per tower, and the different combinations each have different effects, not to mention each enemy is affected to a greater or lesser degree by each colour of attack.

The first few levels are, if I’m honest, very very easy indeed, then all of a sudden, the 3rd last level is crazy hard!  The various ‘baddies’ come from 3 different entrances, and trying to fund enough towers to have them all covered is more than a little challenging.  I’m not ashamed to say it took me many many attempts to beat it, and yet, the final 2 levels were surprisingly easy…  Perhaps it was just by comparison, but I was readying myself for a massive challenge in the final level and that never really materialised which was an unfortunate end to an otherwise sound game.

There is no replayability to the game, once it’s beaten there’s little point in replaying, but part of me hopes that there will be some sort of add-on, alternative levels, more challenging foes, something of the type that Tower Madness released recently.  If my hopes come to nothing, then don’t despair, this game is enjoyable and suitably challenging, not a massive hit, not the best tower defence game out there, but fun and interesting nonetheless!