Glory Days

Glory Days - Tactical Defense Review

Odenis Studio is tapping into its past to move into the future. Glory Days - Tactical Defense has arrived in the DSi Shop as the third DSiWare design from the France-based developer, but rather than being an all-new effort it seems to draw on the strengths of two of the company's previous hits.

The first place is in its branding, as the last time we saw the name "Glory Days" was back in 2007 for the well-received but under-recognized Glory Days 2. The fact that Odenis is now bringing back that same attention-deserving brand can only be a good thing.

And the second is in visual presentation. Any DSi owner who was smart enough to download either Pop Island or its follow-up Pop Island - Paperfield knows that Odenis managed to create an incredibly attractive, silky-smooth 3D engine for those two titles. They played games of Capture the Flag with it, but here it's being pressed back into service for tower defense.

So the pedigree is solid, and the visuals are technically sound. Things are looking good, for starters. This new Glory Days loses a bit of its luster, though, with the simplicity of the gameplay you get.

Single missions can last a long, long time.

Anyone who pays even the slightest attention to DSiWare games is already intimately familiar with the tower defense genre, and Tactical Defense here is a pretty by-the-book example of the idea -- you've got wave upon wave of enemy units advancing on your position and it's up to you to build stationary sentry guns, rocket launchers, and the like along their path of attack to destroy them before they make it all the way to your front door. You can upgrade each tower a couple of times, cash them in to get a monetary refund to build something different and fix them up when they get damaged. All the standard stuff.

There are only half a dozen different towers to choose from, though, so it feels like you see almost all the strategic depth available to you after just the first few minutes -- there are anti-aircraft artilleries, ground-targeting guns, and a "nuke 'em all" option called The Big One that blasts friend and foe alike. It works, and I understand the appeal of a streamlined selection in a game like this, but it still feels a bit thin to me.

Placement of the towers ends up becoming much more of a factor than the individual towers themselves, then, and that's handled in a fairly unique way. You're given a transparent cube cursor that bounces and rolls around the battlefield one square at a time -- it's on button control, too, so there's no zooming around and using the stylus to just tap where you want to drop your next line of defense. That's definitely different, and it works well enough. But when things get really fast-paced and frantic and you're trying to cover all of what's happening across an entire map with that one little rolling cube cursor, it can be hard to get it into position quickly and accurately enough.

Last of all, price. You've got to give it to Odenis here, as, like Pop Island - Paperfield last summer, they've sent this latest design into the Shop for just two bucks. That really helps sell the experience overall for me -- I may not be entirely sold on its depth of design or the control style they settled on with it, but for only 200 DSi Points there's no way it's not at least worth a look. It's got three different maps and four difficulty settings, too, so if you end up falling in love with it you'll certainly get your money's worth.