Hello there friend,
While I type this, hundreds of thousands of black outlined enemies are being gunned down. I got a fully upgraded machine gun, and I am not afraid to use it. Actually, I am still waiting to use it.
Right now, as I am typing, I am playing through Eternal Red, a Tower Defense mixed with some Action Platformer elements. The visuals are pretty good, very unique, the music though a little low-tone is about what you'd expect, and though I am partly annoyed at the sound of their machine gun turrets, it's not the big complaint. That comes down to the Mechanics.
Now what do I mean by mechanics? Well, it's simply the method of play, how the user interacts with the game, and what those choices do to effect an outcome. This being a tower defense game, the objective is simply stopping spawning enemires from reaching the end, as the game progresses, the spawns become faster, harder to kill, or gain some nifty abilities to keep the player on his toes.
Eternal Red gives you money for kills, and in turn you spend the money on turrets, floor panels, weapons and upgrades. Seems like a simple reward system. The first problem with this is that if you're doing well, you'll almost always be doing well simply because you have the money to keep up with upgrades and weapons, while if you fail to stop the enemies early, you wont have the money to continue on and catch up.
The second issue comes down to turret and panel placement. You have specific areas to build turrets/panels, and a choice of turret types, being Machine Gun, Acid, Mortor, and Money (Machine Gun turrets that give cash for damage). And all you will ever use is the Machine Gun.
Machine Gun turrets have very good range, damage, rate of fire. When 5 are maxed out, you will find they can focus-fire down a target with relative ease.
Mortors on the other hand use high damage with splash, with very low firing rate. The issue here is there is very rarely a time where Mortors are hitting more than a single target, maybe two, so their splash mechanic isnt even needed, and in fact serves as a handicap later on. The only time I've found Mortors to work is when I have a Slow Panel (More on that later), to slow walking enemies (derp!) down enough that flying ones can catch up.
Acid turrets deal damage over time, and since everything dies so quickly to Machine Gun turrets, there is no circumstance in the game that would benefit from this turret being used.
Money turrets are interesting, and I tried to use them in the first two play-throughs, but to be frank, by the time you get the money to buy this turret, you will have missed out on a lot of upgrades that makes the game significantly harder. It will take a long time and alot of upgrades before this turret even starts making it's money back, and near as I can tell it functions as just another Machine Gun.
You also have panels, Spikes, Slow and Acid. Panels work great in the opening levels, and then become entirely useless in the later ones, due to the amount of flying enemies.
Spikes are basicly direct damage to walking enemies. The longer they are in the Spikes, the more damage they take walking through. They are alright for supplimenting turrets early on, but I havent found a use for them in level 20+.
Slow is a freezing panel that when stepped on, reduces the enemy movement for a short duration. Though a useful tool in most Tower Defense games, this one does not feel like a necessity.
Acid Panels work much like the Acid Turret, Damage over Time. They dont feel particularly useful, but are probably more useful than their turret counterpart because they are not stopping you from putting up a Machine Gun.
There are three kinds of guns you can buy, the pistol, the shotgun and the 'machine gun'. These guns have reload/cooldown mechanics, unlike the turrets, but their damage potential exceeds anything else in the game, and I suspect this is what the developer was trying to keep most of the focus on.
So why am I bringing so much attention to a game that I just dont take much joy in playing, more so one I am activly still playing while I write this article? Well, it's mostly because I do see how this game COULD have been so much better, and through alot of minor things! It's a game where it is trying to do too much at once, and not checking if all the parts are working with, or against each other.
Let's start with the lynchpin problem. If you're doing well, you're killing everything, and if you're killing everything you are now gaining so much money to get better at killing everything. It's a cycle that gives players two extreme circumstances. where if they are doing well they will do very well, and if not, they have no chance to recover.
It's a cycle that needs some up-close scrutiny. The good part is you have a 'carrot' at the end of a stick to guide the player and give their progression, but this system only works if the challenges are difficult enough to warrent the resources being gained.
(Note: I now JUST finished this play through on the previous paragraph)
In my example when I decided to simply build five Machine Guns, all I did was upgrade the power on the front two, and range on the back three. This allowed my defense to kill every spawn with focus fire and then it just became a simple task of upgrading ranges so they could all hit the same target in the front, and then upgrading the damage and rate of fire afterwards.
Once this was set up, it wasnt until wave 60 out of 70 did the mobs start breaking past, which gave me a reason to spend my income that has been storing up for the past 25-30 rounds to buy a gun or more turrets and quickly fully-upgrade them.
If you want to keep the player engaged, you cant have the player watch his pretty turrets do all the work and wait until circumstances give him something to do. Sure it's nice to know the defense you set up works, but I knew that 40 rounds ago.
Let's take a quick look at another Tower Defense game you more likely played: Plants vs Zombies. In Plants vs Zombies, the income was Sunlight. You needed to actively click on these little suns that fall onto the field while managing your plants, and it was through sunlight you made your defense.
We have a character with a gun able to build turrets and jump like Mario, I am sure we can give this guy something to do if his turrets are enough defense.
The second issue comes down to the enemy spawn. The enemies spawn to rythem, constantly marching in to pace, it becomes very easy to focus-fire them down one at a time when all of your turrets are in range the second they pop out of the gate. However, this is an easier solution.
If you can randomize how many enemies spawn each time through the gate, or have it speratic spawning, you can over-load the front turrets with targets and allow the future enemies to go a little further in, forcing player interaction to stem the damage.
Now, after 70 some levels, I have to say though it's not a game play issue, it is an issue of pacing. The wait times between levels are there for you to have a chance to upgrade your turrets and panels. Again, while the route of the Machine Gun setup makes my character all but useless, I am upgrading as I get the income available, so to me (and many players I suspect) I am often sitting for long periods of time idle.
So is it a simple matter of reducing Machine Gun Turret damage? Well, not exactly. The Machine Gun Turret's biggest advantage is that it has an absurd range. If all five turrets were spaced and no enemy could be hit by two turrets at once, eventually one of those enemies might draw fire for another to slip through unscathed, and may get by two or three before any damage is taken.
With the turrets so close however, and their range so far, every target that comes into play is killed almost immidiatly. The turrets are never put in a position of having multiple targets, because the first one is always killed off so quickly that it offers the next one little more than an additional step before meeting the same fate.
As stated before hand, the other turrets dont offer much in the way of practicality, because the Machine Gun just becomes a clearly better route. Well, what could we do to change that?
A simple way to do that is to change a fundamental but important mechanic. How Damage works.
Let's re-design for a moment the Machine Gun, so that it does Low Damage and has a High Firing Rate. It's damage comes from an unrelenting amount of lead being poored out, and now fundamentally works in the same manner. However, if we take a unit and give him 'armour', reducing damage taken down to menial chip damage, then suddenly your Machine Guns arnt killing him quite as quickly, and may drop him by the time he gets to the end of the line, but by that time all the mobs behind him have moved so far passed your defenses that some will sneak by your defenses.
Now we have a reason for the Mortor. The Mortor deals High Damage at a Low Firing Rate. So now the Armour isnt reducing every shot down to scratches on the paint!
What about Acid? Well, I think the first thing we have to look at is the Damage Per Second that is being brought out of most of the Acid attacks. Acid can offer an interesting 'constant' damage, and perhaps be another way of getting around Armour. It also is one of those turret/panels that need to be placed in the front, because catching an enemy at the tail-end of his lifebar makes for a wasted investment. That simple point means you can force your player into some interesting decision making.
At the end of the day, what really holds Eternal Red back is that all of it's elements dont work together, they detract from one another. You don't need panels to win, you don't need guns to win, and your turret decisions arn't decisions. Instead, it's a player waiting for something interesting to happen, and unfortunetly, found writing a blog about it was more engaging.
I think what really makes my blood boil about this is that the good elements are there, and they want to come out. There is a good flash game here, somewhere....
Until next time,
- D-Pad Duke
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