Giveaway of the Day - Iron Serpent Defense

Developers rely on good feedback to improve their games. If you download this game please take some time once you’ve played it a while to leave some constructive feedback either positive or negative. The more constructive feedback we get, the more likely developers are going to give more games away. The giveaway site already has a very good standing with the search engines. Developers want their products out there on the WWW, this site has the potential to do that. The game giveaway project gives away on average between 9 to 17 thousand downloads for each game depending upon what genre and how obscure the game is. That’s a lot of homes these games are being downloaded into and a lot of ‘potential’ cash that’s being lost by the developers. If we get better games because of better feedback, the community are likely to continue to benefit from the generosity of the developers. Satisfied community members are then more likely to visit the home sites of those developers and purchase games that they may not have bothered with before they discovered the developer via the game giveaway site, thus giving the developers more incentives to give away even more decent games.

Please leave some feedback once you’ve checked the game out. It can be positive or negative, but please explain why your reasons for the feedback you post. You could also leave suggestions for improving the game, for example, this game could do with a levels editor, add more power-ups, describing the ones you think would be suitable, add some mini games (which seem all the rage in some arcade games now) or enable the user to be able to change the in game music easily.

Thank you in advance to all those who take the time to post a constructive comment.

Regards

Whiterabbit aka Stephen

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Iron Serpent: Defence:

Installation

Today’s game downloads to a 9.21Mb zip file that unpacks to a read me and a dual wrapped setup and activation file that contains the activation code and executable. The game installs to

C:/Games/Iron-Serpent Defense

The game works fine in Win 7, Vista and Win XP. As with all Wheemplay games, the games executable is installed directly into the games folder with no folder of it’s own. There’s no uninstaller, just delete the file if you decide not to keep it. The developer has misspelled part of the game title that is defense rather than defense. There is no shortcut installed so you’ll have to create one manually. If you want a shortcut in the Start Menu/Programs list check out the thread in the Game Discussion forums that tells you how to do it.

If you want to check the game out before downloading it you can find it on several flash game sites. The following site seems safe enough:

http://www.onlinegames.net/games/3485/iron-serpent-defense.html

Introduction:

A tower defence game about an expedition on another planet. Scientists found these very aggressive monsters, that want to destroy your base. You must defend it.

Reference accessed 5th June 2011

The Game:

The basic premise of this game – Build towers near the road, to kill monsters. Combine tower types, to pass levels and to defend your main buildings. Failure to accomplish these will result in the game ending. There are no extra lies, you only get one go at saving your main building. . There are four tower types called Toxic, Air, Fire, and Ground. The enemies are also classed as Toxic, Air, Fire, and Ground. The weapon that matches the enemy is the most effective weapon against that particular enemy. Some weapons are useless against other types. You can upgrade each tower to cover a greater area of the map by left clicking on it. When you click on the tower for the first time it will show a health bar and two buttons. One is an upgrade button, the other a sell button. You do not get the same amount of money selling a weapon as you paid for it, but selling a weapon can be a good tactic in the end game of each level when the weapons placed at the beginning of a route are no longer being used. Sell these to bolster your defences near to your main buildings.

There are twelve levels, each successive level getting harder than its predecessor.. It is recommended that you build air towers first, then as needed start building the other towers. There are three awards that you can win in game. These are Clear Winner, Upgrade Master and Game Completion. You can turn the sound/music off via a toggle on the main game screen or from the main menu. Once a level has been unlocked by winning it you can return to it by clicking on the Load Game button, otherwise start a new game by clicking on the New Game button. Only one profile can be used while playing this game. Once you click on new game all previous progress will be wiped from the memory, so if you want to create multiple profiles you’ll need to copy the game executable to different folders so that more than one player can play. Make sure you label each folder with the name of the player.  There is a high score table, accessible from the main menu.

Images:

You can see 30 images as a slideshow showing the various introduction screens plus the first five levels of the game:

http://s571.photobucket.com/albums/ss160/Whiterabbit04/Iron%20Serpent%20Defense/?albumview=slideshow

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Conclusion:

A typical Tower Defence (TD) game with limited playability due to their being only 12 levels to the game. Levels do get harder so it may take you longer than you think to complete the game. It does take a little strategy to win the later levels due to the weapons being ‘fairly’ specific to one enemy (as mentioned above in the Game section). I quite enjoyed playing the game, but, as with other TD games from this developer they are too short and the graphics are not very inspiring. If you miss today’s giveaway you can always play it in your browser via numerous sites that host this game.

I’m biased towards TD games but feel that it doesn’t offer much in its present state (there are a couple of Facebook TD games that are far superior to this one); the developer needs to add more levels, maybe a levels editor so that you can create your own level designs, and also vary the environments more. Apart from some slightly different colored backgrounds every fourth level there was very little variability to any of the levels apart from the waves of enemies getting larger and larger. I’d also add more weapon choices, maybe two types for each enemy. I’d also add more enemies as well. I’ve scored sound & music quite low because it’s a all or nothing w.r.t. turning the sound off. There should be a slider to turn each of them down or off rather than just a toggle to turn both off together. I’d also include repair droids and towers that earn more money to help towards building more towers.

Scoring;

Graphics – 5
Sound & Music – 4
Game Play – 6
Re-playability – 6
Total – 5.25

Other Information:

If you want to check the game out before downloading you can play it in a browser via the following links:

http://www.onlinegames.net/games/3485/iron-serpent-defense.html

There are several sites that host the game, just Google it to find another if you’re not happy with the one I’ve posted above.

Other TD games for free and commercial:

Check out the free games synopsis. I’ve posted several TD games over the last 2 years:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/4534

You will also find some browser versions in the Browser synopsis:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/5709

There’s a dizzying array of games, but each one is labelled with the genre it belongs to, so you should easily find the Tower Defence games

There’s a new tower defence game called Sanctum (not free) that’s different to your usual top down TD games. In it you play in the First Person. It’s available from Steam:
[url=http://store.steampowered.com/app/91600/][b]HERE[/b][/url]. Other TD games I highly recommend are Defence Grid: The Awakening available [url=http://store.steampowered.com/app/18500/][b]HERE[/b][/url] and Anomaly: Warzone Earth which is a ‘reverse’ Tower Defence game; you can find details of it [url=http://store.steampowered.com/app/91200/][b]HERE[/b][/url]. Another that’s well worth getting called Revenge of the Titans was originally included in the second Humble bundle, where you can pay what you want. the average gamers paid for the five games included in the package (worth over $40) was just over $5, that deal is no longer available (at the moment), but it’s worth keeping your eyes open in the game discussion forums for details of the next Humble bundle (number 4), there’s the possibility that they may include all previous games in the deal, so you could get the game for virtually nothing. That said, at the moment you have to pay £8.99, which seems a little steep by today’s standards, but I can say from playing it that it’s well worth it. It’s got loads of weapons and power ups. some may find the retro graphics a bit of a let-down, but I find them a perfect complement to the particular game play that titans gives you. you can check it out via the following link:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/93200/

There’s also one called Monster Mash that is given away free every four months or so from Sandlot Games. There’s a thread dedicated to the freebies over in the Game Discussion forums. They give away about 20 games that turn over each week. At the moment you can get Super Granny 3 for free. That will change tomorrow, so if you don’t already have the game and love platform games go grab it now via the following link. you will need to create an account (which is free), but it’s well worth it as there’s an excellent selection of free games. You can see the list of free games to the right of the first page:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/forums/topic/6554

Check out the following sites for loads of free Browser based TD games:

http://towerdefensegames.com/

http://www.towerdefence.net/

http://www.playtowerdefensegames.com/

http://www.defendthetowers.com/

http://www.mytowerdefencegames.com/

http://www.freewebarcade.com/tower-defense-games.php

http://www.defencetowergames.com/

http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/Game.asp (Facebook game)

http://ninjakiwi.com/Games/Tower-Defense/Bloons-Tower-Defense-3.html

http://turretdefensegames.com/

http://www.brothersoft.com/games/mini-games/tower-defence/

Make sure you have a pop up blocker as some of these sites will try to swamp you with popups, but apart from that they seem safe to go to. Firefox’s pop up blocker should cope with all of them.

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The game is good, but it has lots of downsides too. First: the towers don’t fire at the monsters until they are almost out of the towers’ range. Second: Yous should show how much the upgrades cost. Third: lvl 5 Seems impossible, but that is probably because of the First down side I mentioned earlier. Besides those three problems it’s all good, thanks GOTD and Wheemplay!

………………………Moderator Comment…………………………

Hi Paco, thanks for your feed back. The game has been designed like that, that is the weapons are specific to the monster they fire at. some weapons are totally ineffective against a particular type whereas at least one weapon is very effective. you just need to make sure you know which weapon is the best for the particular monster that is invading. The developer does say that initially use the air defences rather than any of the other three. As for the cost of upgrades, these are the same price as the cost of the weapon you are upgrading. Still, you are right, it should at least be mentioned.

You’ll also see at the start of a game a screen that shows you which weapon is the best for which enemey; they are color coded, the green reptile is best destroyed by the green colored weapon, the blue turtle like enemy is best destroyed by the blue weapon etc Fire and Ground are not as easy to distinguish using color .

As for level 5, I died on that one on my first try, lol, you need to use the ground turrets for that level. all the enemy are ground based, so if you just use ground level weapons your going to get the most effective firepoer. The only problem with that strategy though is that the ground weapons cost the most. you can only create two initially, which could be a problem. It may actually be better to initially use the cheaper weapons then build the ground weapons later. I’ going to try that strategy now. lol The last image I’ve posted below is level 5. you can see the ground enemy are enmass rather than coming in dribs and drabs, which makes it a lot more difficult to destroy.