Prime World: Defenders Review

Prime World: Defenders Review

As a newbie to the tower defense genre, I looked forward to playing Prime World: Defenders. I have only dabbled in strategy games, playing both RTS (namely Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun) and turn based (particularly every English release of Fire Emblem except for the latest one), so I figured  a tower defense game shouldn’t be too hard to pick up.  While I did quickly adapt to the controls and core concepts, I never really got into the game, and at times found it to be more tedious and boring than fun and exciting. However, for those of you who are a fan of tower defense games, Prime World might be worth looking into. 

Story

PWD’s story spans 23 missions and is told through a series of comic book-like still cutscenes. While the art during the cutscenes are pretty well done, the story itself is downright dreadful. I didn’t know what was going on the entire time, and never felt attached to any of the characters. After I finished a story mission, I would take that time to answer texts instead of listening to the abysmal dialogue, delivered by boring characters, voiced by equally terrible voice actors. In short, if you’re looking for an engaging story, look somewhere else.

Gameplay

Prime World’s gameplay, for the most part, makes up for its pitiful excuse for a story. Like a typical tower defense game, you fight off waves of varying enemies with different types of towers and spells that you construct/use throughout the level. In Prime World’s case, its sports 20 different towers and 11 different spells, as well as 36 different types of enemies.

As you progress through the game, you can earn or buy cards; the cards will either have a tower, a spell, or an artifact on it. Using the forge system, you can evolve your towers by merging 2 tower cards of the same kind together to make a stronger tower. You can also level up your spell and tower cards by fusing them with artifacts or other unwanted cards, making them even more powerful. Before entering battle, you must select which towers and spells you want at your disposal in your deck, which you must adjust depending on which enemies you will be facing.

The game starts out pretty slow with a fairly long tutorial on how to handle all the systems. While it was informative, it would have been nice if was shortened by a few levels. After the first boss battle, you unlock unlimited, randomly generated side quests that range in difficulty. Doing these side quests are very important for getting better towers and spells, as well as providing  you with the means  to level them up. Unfortunately, the side quests get boring very quickly, since it repeats the same couple maps over and over, and while the allowed locations to build towers change from map to map, the routs stay the same. I found that after a playing a few of the levels multiple times, I figured out the best places to put towers and would win effortlessly.

One of my biggest issues is how unbalanced the game is. In the matter of one level, I went from dominating my enemies with ease to being infuriated by a seemingly impossible level. This steep increase in difficulty was a major turn off for me. It also didn’t help that as the enemies got harder, the amount of prime (the in-battle currency that you use to build towers) they dropped was so miniscule that I couldn’t build better, stronger towers. It was infuriating to say the least.

Graphics & Sound

For Prime World, the graphics and sound were on opposite ends of the spectrum. On the graphical side, PWD is a visually appealing game. The in-game maps, towers, and enemies all look beautiful and run smoothly. The cut scene art is also enjoyable to look at. On the other end of the spectrum, however, is PWD’s sound. The in-game music was so annoying and repetitive that I eventually turned it off and put on one of my Spotify playlists. Worse still were the voice actors. The stupid one liners (“I’ve got a surprise for you monsters!”) that they would spew out every once and while mid-battle were like nails on a chalk board in terms of how annoying and awful they were. If you play this game, you’re better off muting the sound and putting on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack in the background to make things more epic.

Issues

As I mentioned during the review, my biggest issues were with the imbalance in difficulty, sound, and story. Everything else in the game ran smoothly and I didn’t see any glitches.

SpawnFirst Recommends…

Prime World: Defenders was not my cup of tea and I had a tough time getting into it. However, if you’re a fan of the tower defense genre, I would recommend getting this game IF you can find it cheap (costs $14.99 on Steam).

SCORE: 6.5/10