The Grumpy Old Gamers

September 12, 2019|All Reviews, New Fangled Review

I picked up this game on my Nintendo Switch for 2 very good reasons, first it is an tower defense style game, and I loves me some tower defense and secondly it was on sale for 60% off, and this Grumpy Old Gamer loves a great deal even more.  Assault on Metaltron is made by Blue Sunset Games and as mentioned in my opening statement is an tower defense style game.  

The game play for this game is mostly standard, you build your towers on specific spots, in this game its kind of rubbish piles/trees, and you start each match with a set amount of “money”.  On thing that is different is your not just moving a cursor around going to these rubbish piles and choosing your towers, you have a robot character you need to move around the screen to build your towers, which adds some new elements because you need to race to the different points on the map to build your towers as the enemies are moving along their path.

There is a large amount of towers to choose from, and I do have a hard time really telling which ones are more powerful, which are better for which enemies (flying or ground for example), and which is the best bang for your buck.

Now the part that makes this game different from other tower defense games is according to their write up on Nintendo’s web site they are the ” First action tower defense game where you power up your towers however you like “.  This statement is true and definitely one of more interesting points in the game.  You can update 3 categories in your towers: Damage, Range, and Cooldown (rate of fire).

There are 5 upgrade spots per tower and you can choose which you would like to boost accordingly.  Now this is where the strategy comes in in this game because you have to either choose to buy your upgrade, and they are pricey, like pricier then towers pricey. Or you need to have your robot dance in an upgrade…. no there are no typos in that statement. The robot will dance in an upgrade for free, you just have to give him the time to do it.  So you choose which stat to increase and he will dance it in for free.  See the dancing below 🙂

So the dancing is different and is definitely better then the standard welding and sparks flying you would see with any other upgrade process in a game, and really adds a new dynamic to this game, constantly trying to juggle, “do I run over there and build a new tower?” or “do I have time to dance in an upgrade before the bad guys show up?”. 

Which leads me to the overall game.  The game feels difficult and challenging and I think there is a lot to play around with in customizing your towers, and the push and pull of the paying or dancing for your upgrades.  But I really don’t feel the drive to do this, one reason is the selection of things in the menus is hard to determine and its hard to move the cursor around to make the proper selections with the unnaturally placed button layout (B seems to do double duty in some menus of selecting and backing out) and other times its hard to tell if you have the cancel or the next upgrade selected in the menu,  I’ve played the first 20 levels and really don’t feel the urge to go much further, i probably will LOL but it will be begrudgingly.

At $8.79 CDN its cheap enough to scratch that tower defense itch, but if you look around I think there may be some better options out there.

Otherwise GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!!!!!!