Today's game giveaway is basically an expansion of Royal Defense and was given away on the 10th September 2017 HERE, where it received a positive 84% from 37 votes. I've re-posted the main review that I posted back then with some image changes to reflect the new content. Most of the review however remains unchanged. The Steam version, which you can find HERE includes both games combined (you have to own the main game to be able to get the 'Invisible Threat' expansion. The MPC versions (i.e. Royal Defense and Royal Defense: Invisible Threat) are free standing versions.

To get a feel for today's game before you download it, please check out a few game play videos of Royal Defense HERE and HERE, plus a slideshow of around 30 in game images HERE.

Royal Defense: Invisible Threat

In Brief

Royal Defense: Invisible Threat is a top down Tower Defense game.

Introduction:

Defend the fortress from the hordes of trolls in the dynamic game Royal Defense: Invisible Threat! Poor dwarves are protecting their fortress and the hordes of trolls are trying to invade the land! To begin with, choose the difficulty mode: Easy, Normal or Hard. 2 different campaigns are waiting for you: Forgotten Fields and Snowfall Mountains. But you have to earn a certain number of stars to unlock the second campaign. You can buy weapons with the coins that you get at the beginning of each level and then choose a strategically sensible place for them. You also earn coins by killing enemies or by building mines. The gold you earn can also be used to upgrade your weapons. when the hordes of enemies become too much use your magic spells! for example meteor rain, earthquake and swamp. These significantly damage your enemies. Frost will slow them down.

Edited reference accessed HERE. 22nd Sept 2017.

Features:

⦁ 60 different progressively challenging levels
⦁ unique game settings
⦁ 17 kinds of creatures
⦁ 12 kinds of towers and structures
⦁ Extensive magic system
⦁ Various upgrades

The Game:

For those of you not familiar with the tower defense genre, here is a quick overview. In tower defense games the object is to stop waves of enemies from reaching your castle, fort, stronghold, etc. In order to stop these enemies you need to build towers to attack them. Players need to strategically place different types of towers in order to try and stop all or most of the enemies.

Royal Defense has four basic types of towers with upgraded towers for each type. The game includes the typical arrow, cannon, mortar/splash, and the money tower. If you read my review of Fort Defense this will sound very familiar since it is exactly the same in Fort Defense. The majority of the towers that you are going to build are going to be arrow and/or cannon towers.

Just like Fort Defense you kind of need to decide whether you are going to focus on arrow or cannon towers. You should focus on one or the other so you are able to focus your upgrades on that type of tower. In Fort Defense I went mostly with cannon towers since they have a longer range and do more damage. In Royal Defense I decided to switch things up and focus on arrow towers. This was due to the frustration in Fort Defense where you couldn’t kill air units in early waves if you focused on cannon towers. I would say that the arrow towers are the right choice in Royal Defense since they do well against the air and ground units.

I didn’t have much use for the other two types of towers. I actually don’t think I built any mortar/splash towers outside the tutorial levels that explained them. I didn’t get much use out of them since most levels don’t have large groupings of enemies and for the few that do I didn’t feel like wasting upgrade gems to upgrade the mortar towers when I rarely used them.

I was actually surprised how little I used the money towers. In Fort Defense I used quite a few money towers since they were quite helpful. The money towers would be helpful in Royal Defense as well except that there is a lack of open spaces to build towers in Royal Defense. Since there are so few spaces, those spaces need to be filled with towers that actually do damage. Before world three I don’t think I built a single money tower.

Royal Defense is a pretty typical tower defense game. It pretty much has what you would expect. The game plays perfectly fine and the artwork is pretty nice. I had fun playing the game. Unfortunately Royal Defense is far from an original game. I honestly can’t point to one thing in the game that is particularly new or original. If you have played a tower defense game before you have pretty much already played Royal Defense.

Royal Defense relies pretty heavily on its’ special currency, gems. The idea behind the gems is a solid game mechanic that has been used by other tower defense games. I think it is a good idea rewarding players with the ability to purchase more upgrades based on how well they do in levels. Royal Defense is a little stingy with the gems though in my opinion.

The problem with the gems comes from the tower locations in every level that are locked unless you use some of your gems to unlock them. If there was one or maybe two locations per level that required using gems to unlock I wouldn’t have had a huge issue with it. In Royal Defense some levels have three or four locations that are locked. On top of it the locations that are locked are usually some of the most critical positions in the entire map. With this reliance on locked positions, the game presents you with two options. Either avoid using the key positions on the map or waste your precious gems to unlock a location that will only help you in one level. Since I wasn’t going to waste gems on unlocking locations, I had to play the game missing many important tower locations.

These locked positions just feel so pointless like they were added as an excuse for some micro-transactions for the mobile versions of the game. I just don’t know why the game felt the need to lock them. If the game wanted to be more difficult it should have just eliminated these positions from the map entirely. Otherwise the game could have just kept all of the positions unlocked and given the player less gems in order to increase the difficulty.

Starting in world three the game starts introducing invisible enemies. These enemies can only be attacked by your towers if they are seen by one of your radar towers or if they have been recently damaged. I like the idea of invisible enemies since it makes you vary your tower strategy instead of just loading up the map with the same tower type. The problem with the invisible enemies is detecting them. There are only two ways to detect invisible enemies.

First you can use some of your special abilities in order to damage the enemies which will allow your other towers to detect the invisible enemies. This strategy works pretty well for a while. Unless you upgraded your special abilities recharge rate though, you will likely run out of special abilities to use on the enemies. You will then have to let invisible enemies through your lines until the abilities recharge.

The more permanent solution is to use the radar tower. The radar tower is one of the upgraded forms of the money tower. The radar tower is a good idea but it presents two problems.

First the tower is really expensive. In the later waves this isn’t a problem since you will be swimming in money. The problem is that the game likes to throw invisible enemies in the early waves where you can either not afford the tower or you have to spend almost all of your money just to be able to afford it. Usually you end up being forced to use your special abilities in the early waves to damage the invisible enemies so they can be spotted by your other towers.

The other problem comes from a lack of space. Each level just doesn’t have enough spaces to place towers on. Since the radar tower doesn’t attack enemies, this means that you have to waste spaces just to detect invisible enemies instead of using the spaces to build towers that actually damage enemies. Without unlocking the additional spaces, some of the levels only have a handful of locations to build on in the first place. This means that you will only be able to place a few towers that can actually attack the enemies.

The amount of gameplay you can get out of Royal Defense will depend on how much effort you want to put into the game. The game includes 60 levels, which is actually 20 more than Fort Defense, but each level only takes a couple minutes to complete. If you just play through the game one time without trying to perfect every level, you can expect around five or so hours of gameplay. If you replay levels, try additional difficulty levels or try for all of the achievements, it may take you quite a bit longer. Royal Defense was just not engaging enough for me to continue playing the game after I beat all of the levels.

Royal Defense is what I would call a very average tower defense game. Like its’ sequel Fort Defense, you can have fun playing the game but it fails to do anything original. Royal Defense also has some issues with level balancing and there are not enough locations for towers in some of the levels. If you have never tried a tower defense game before or you don’t particularly care for the genre, Royal Defense is probably not the game for you since there are quite a few tower defense games that are considerably better than Royal Defense. If you are a big fan of tower defense games though and you can find Royal Defense on sale, I think you could get some fun out of the game.

Edited reference accessed HERE. Originally posted by Eric Mortensen on 28 Jun, 2015. Edited by Whiterabbit-uk 8th Sept 2017 and reposted 5th June 2020.

Other Reviews and Videos of Royal Defense:

You can see Steam community reviews of Royal Defense HERE, and some videos of game play HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE. You can also see a slideshow of 32 images HERE.

Conclusion:

Tower Defense (TD) games are among my favorite arcade genres (together with shmups, physics based games and breakouts), so was pleased to see this being given away; it's been a while since we were given a TD game (apart from the limited competition giveaways Onion force (July 17 and Aug 16), Alien Shooter TD (Feb 17), and Defend your Life TD (Oct 16) and a full Steam key giveaway Kings Guard TD (Nov 2016)).

Royale Defense is a standard tower defense game, that aficionado's of the genre will probably find a little bland, but for community members who don't play much tower defense, it's definitely a worthwhile game to download IMO. Royal Defense has all the usual elements, a reasonable variety of towers, lots of upgrades, an in game shop where you can improve your towers using the gems you earn by playing the game, as well as some special abilities. The graphics let the game down in my opinion being rather standard, a little uninspiring, and a cheap look that reflects many of this type of game. Most of my favorite tower defense games allow you to zoom in to the enemies (some can even be played in first person) and usually have something new or unusual added to the game play; for example Defense Grid: The Awakening, which despite being several years older than Royal Defense has much better graphics and game play (and incidentally, is still one of my favorite TD games ever).

Useful Information not related to today's game giveaway:

Don't forget to check out the Epic Game store for the latest freebies HERE. The latest game is Overcooked.

Also check out Reddit's Free Games on Steam (These may fluctuate over the week, so it's worth checking daily because there have been quite a few developers offering their commercial games for free during the lock-down - if you see a game, just open your Steam client and search for the game in the store; if it's still available free you'll see that they are 100% off, (though some of the giveaways are via other sites like Alienware; though I advise not following any links to the givekey.ru site as I believe it is a scam site. Read the comments for each giveaway and you'll see the genuine ones. Those with a Steam url, just require you to visit the appropriate store page via your Steam client and you should find the green buy button says 100% off, if it doesn't, it means the giveaway is over. The site is updated frequently, so if a game is no longer available it's usually tagged with an 'Over' icon. Hurry though because these free games don't stay free long. Once added to your account they become permanently attached.

You can also get loads of free DRM free games from Indie Gala and HERE. They have recently added a few more games that look worthwhile, including Construct: Escape the System, Doodle Devil, Skybride, Pixel Puzzles: Japan, Airport Madness World Edition, Culling of the Cows, Naval Warfare, Spirits of Xanadu, Lovely Planet, Dreamscapes: The Sandman: Premium Edition, Waste Walkers Subsistence plus loads more. Most are windows versions, but you'll find some also include Mac versions. They have recently updated their web site so accessing your library is different from several weeks ago; (I find the new format really slow).

Finally check Delenns threads for other freebies both Steam and Non Steam titles HERE and HERE.