Review: Scribble Defense (Xbox Live Indie)
Scribble Defense is such a pleasant surprise. At its core it’s a tower defense game, but thankfully adds a few nice touches. The first thing you’ll probably notice is the graphical style, which reminded me quite a bit of Vib Ribbon. The characters and enemy paths are white lines on a black background which may sound too simple, but it works very well for keeping you focused on the creeps. You never get lost or lose track of your character (which is colored) or the different types of towers (which are also colored).
There are the regular types of tower defense towers, but I did want to mention one addition that really impressed me. Very early on you get a Pull tower, which not only drags enemies towards it (and holds them for a few seconds), it changes the creep paths, dragging them towards that tower. There’s also a pair of enemies (red and blue) that need you to use the Pull tower to make them meet, which destroys both enemies. It doesn’t sound like much, but being able to drag around the level really helps (especially when some of the levels can move themselves around) and having to make enemies run into each other really changes up strategies.
I make it a point to finish all the games I review, but in the interest of transparency, there’s no way I’m going to finish all of the hard levels; tower defense games aren’t the types of games I’m best at. The later levels aren’t unfairly hard, but difficult enough that I could see tower defense aficionados getting a nice challenge. Thankfully, the easier sets of levels introduce you to the different types of towers and smoothly ramps the difficulty up. Along with simple controls that never get in the way of you destroying creeps, virtually everything is easy to use and frustration-free.
I really liked everything about Scribble Defense, especially the ambient, moody soundtrack. For only 80 Microsoft Points (that’s only $1!), you get 20 levels of solid tower defense goodness. If you’ve never played a tower defense game or you love the genre, my recommendation is simply this: buy Scribble Defense.
