Tap Defense Gets New Towers, but Does it make the Game too Easy?
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Tap Defense, the popular free iPhone tower defense game, has been consistently adding new maps and game modes over the past year. But until now, there has been no implementation of new towers for the game. Recently Tapjoy added an update for Tap Defense for new towers. Unlike previous updates, the new towers need to be unlocked. New towers can be unlocked by downloading other iPhone apps. Most of these iPhone apps are paid apps at 99 cents each. Luckily right now there are two free apps that players can download to unlock the two new towers.
The two new towers are the Booster tower and War Ship tower. War Ship towers are effective on maps with lots of water. Water will no longer be a safe spot for the charging demons. Your War ship towers act like floating bomb towers, able to blast through crowds of enemies as they traverse through watery areas. But it is the Booster towers that make the game very unbalanced. Booster towers can boost your tower’s damage strength. When fully upgraded, the booster towers can double the attack strength of your towers. Even the Storm towers can double its damage to 50% when Booster tower and Storm tower are fully upgraded. What’s more, Booster tower is relatively cheap to build, making it easy to double your towers attack strength.
Adding the Booster tower is like building two offensive towers in one square. This can make the game incredibly easy. At the end of a game, the player can easily have over 1 million gold pieces left playing on a classic game mode. High scores will need to be rewritten with these two new towers addition.
Perhaps developers intend for these towers to be used as “cheats” since they need to be unlocked. However, new tower additions should be added with caution. They should be thoroughly tested as they should add new and enhanced game play experience to players. I would imagine that developers will be updating Tap Defense for better game balance in the future. For now, if you find Tap Defense too easy with these towers, either don’t use them, or play them on an especially difficult game mode such as the ten towers or sudden death.
August 24th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
It’s great to see that Tapjoy have added a couple of new towers, although more testing should’ve been done before releasing them, especially regarding the Booster tower.
Not only can you double the dmg of towers surrounding the relatively cheap fully upgraded Booster tower, but you can build multiple Booster towers around your attack towers, essentially multiplying their dmg further. This becomes ridiculously unbalanced when you combine multiple Booster towers with a Storm tower, bringing its dmg to 100%.
There’s also a bug where you can get a free +25% dmg on your towers without having to spend gold on a Booster tower. What you do is place a Booster tower near the towers you want to give the upgrade to, but don’t actually build it.
Hopefully Tapjoy will address these issues with an update.