Magic Staves:

In Brief:
Magic Staves is another Tower Defence (TD) game, with staves taking the place of towers. It's the usual 2D top-down fare with enemies following various paths, sometimes from two different directions. As you progress through the colourful levels the number of enemy waves increases. There are several different staves to use to protect your magic crystals. If the enemy destroy them, the game is over.

You can see a video of game play HERE.

The Game:
Magic Staves is very similar to last week's Turrim with several different tower defences that are in the form of Staves. Initially you only have access to five defences, one of which is a non-permanent placement defence in the form of a 'sort of' plasma bomb, that is very useful on multiple enemies when congregated near the home base (because each enemy will be affected by the bomb). The home base is in the form of a fancy looking coat of arms which periodically creates red crystals which can be used to activate the explosive defence. To use this defence, select it with one click of the left mouse button, then click where you wish the explosion to take place.

The other four defences in the first few levels include the Magician, who has the greatest reach, but is slower to recharge than the Destroyer, who is your basic 'go to' weapon, though either of these two placeable towers are useful in the early stages of the game. What the wizard loses in its slower recharge speed (approx' half of the Destroyers reload speed) it makes up for by being able to cover a much larger area and is slightly cheaper than the Destroyer (at least initially). Then, the next tower to consider is the Moderator that slows down the enemies' advance, this is a useful tower defence, especially when used in conjunction with The Moon defence, which has a rapid rate of fire. Every time you place a new tower of the same type, it costs an extra two coins to place, so, the more you place, the more expensive it becomes. Coins are earned by destroying enemies with some coins being created by the home base (I'm not sure if the latter is correct, but I think it is?).


When you move on to later levels you also get two crystal improvers i.e., speed up red crystal production and increase maximum red crystal production (each improvement adds an extra 10 crystals to the store capacity) as well as one that adds extra damage to the destroyer defence.

Later levels may introduce other buffs that I've not experienced yet as I keep losing my home base before I can get to the end of the last few waves of the second level.

Each level shows you where to expect the enemy to appear via a marker (that I initially thought looked like a blue apple) with a countdown indicating the number of enemies still to come before the next wave is due. This gives you some warning of multiple routes on some levels.

You must protect the home base from attack by enemy forces. The base creates red crystals, at a steady rate; 'initially' this is up to a maximum of 20, so make sure you use them, once it's up to the maximum as further production of red crystals are just lost; bearing in mind, each use of the buff costs increasingly more crystals to use, i.e., each time you use a bomb it costs one extra red crystal. Using the crystal multipliers can be advantageous as they increase the speed of production of red crystals as well as increase the number of red crystals that can be stored at any one time by ten for each purchase of the buff.

You can see how much life the home base has via its life bar, located above the coat of arms; if this reaches zero, the level restarts. Each successive level has increased numbers of waves to contend with and also becomes much harder to beat, unless you've figured out a successful strategy to survive each wave.

Once you've completed at least one wave the game will save your progress and a new main menu item will be added called Continue; however, if you click on new game, all previous progress will be deleted.

Conclusion:
Magic Staves isn't the best tower defence (TD) game I've played over the years and lacks some of the usual things you'd expect to see in a TD game such as a speed up button, more tower defence types and more importantly, tower upgrades; however, I still think Magic Staves is worth download; especially if you like TD games. The reason I say this is because (as with last week's Turrim giveaway) it's quite challenging from the outset (i.e., from level one); at least until you figure out the combination of towers and the crystal multipliers you should use. The levels with more than one point of attack are the most difficult, so judicious use of the different tower defences is called for when multiple points of attack are seen; (I'd start with the wizard as your first line of defence as it should be able to cover both routes if the defence is place appropriately.


My first attempt at getting through the first level was successful but trying to pass the second level was difficult. As I'm pushed for time to get this posted, I've put the game aside, but will attempt to gain higher levels later today (I'm keen to play some of the game sI purchased in the Steam Halloween sale, which I bought last night. The sale ends today at 10am Pacific, 12 noon Eastern, 5pm UK. There are thousands of games to choose from. My advice if you are looking to get a decent game at a discount, check out this link HERE. Delenn messaged it to me via Steam the other day. You can arrange the best deals via a filter, or alternatively, go to the Steam store and click on the specials button part way down the home page then click on the relevance button and select sort by user reviews. This puts the games that have garnered the highest thumbs up first. That way you're more likely to guarantee a decent game. Sadly, many of the Steam lists that list all the deals, contain hundreds of poorly made games and games that are basically rip offs of other games, using assets from those cheap game engines like RPG Maker and Game Maker, so it can be really difficult to find the decent stuff.

Notes on Security
I scanned a zipped copy of the installed game using Virus Total and it found zero hits from 65 antimalware engines. You can see the results of the scan HERE.