I big problem, compared to the first one, is that your tower specilisation is irrelevant since you're forced into diversity in types of towers due to small maps and a drastic scarcity of good building spots. Economy/mana upgrades are much much more useful.
Just by reading you understand stats are imbalanced in favour of Dexterity, Speed serves little purpose aside from making the game less painfully sluggish; plus ennemies are uninteresting and opening the inventory plus drag&dropping each single piece of equipment is a chore. After three levels I'm already starting to get bored. After ten I'm pretty sure this is bad.
Hardcoding keyboard keys is BAD idea. Even when switiching my OS to QWERTY mode, I still input local letters (unlike in this comment box, per instance).
Toying with the possible evolution of that experience, I'm not expecting a sequel to be honest. Execution might be refined, but I wonder how you could top this SF plot. Besides, I wonder how this is a real Flash and not just a "choose your own adventure" text with hyperlink interface and custom presentation. Rewritten: how much responsible are the artwork and the music for the emotions we felt while reading ? Could it be paper-printable without any loss ? Would it be better/worse with our on imagination to define the mood and characters' look ?
Well Greg, I agree with you that this is decent writing at best, and that fanboys naming you Godlike are a bit over the top. However, the storyline itself is pure awesomeness. Perhaps you're not the next big literary author, but certainly a great scenarist and storyteller. There are many great books I didn't read twice, yet did I walk through all the endings of that story for the third time in one year. 5/5.
To be quite honest, I gave up on being a great writer a long time ago. I've since settled for aspiring to be a clear and concise one instead. So as long as the story meets the latter criteria, I'll still count it as a victory!
Audio and graphic presentation is good, even if the character artworks are a bit amateurish compared to the whole production values. A little more soundtracks wouldn't have hurt.
The storyline is insipid to me. The king is dead, you're a brainless female general chasing demons and facing people with the general following drama : "Who are you, demon ?" "Hi. I'm an emotionless mysterious person from the shadows, and I'm here to help you." "I don't believe you." "We share the same world, and I want to save it." "Oh, okay, while I didn't belive you yesterday and while you just told me you abducted our princess during the 20 past years, I believe you." Then you wander in order to er... defend towns that are conveniently attacked at the exact moment you get there. Also the usual artifacts scattered in all the land, and the final boss you never faced before that has one line of text when defeated : "Nooooooooooo !" Great character. Then your protagnonist, having been in a bad mood during the whole campaign (as in "you're draining the moral of everyone, me included"), declares party time. Woohoo.
The turn base pseudo-strategy is totally meaningless : locations provide so few ressources per turn, and there is no penalty for stalling and grind old levels. It's just some ressource loss randomizer, and the best way to prevent that is to spend those ASAP... what you're doing anyway. In short, useless feature requiring no real choice from the user.
The actual real-time game is way more simplistic than the average tower defense. You basically have 4 towers, generally using only two of them (archers + else). There is little reward for upgrading towers until you get tors, and spamming low-cost "towers" is usually more effective. What's more, ennemies are all the same : more of less resilient beasts damaging melee defenders and somewhat more or less resilient to archers, and the occasional flyers only damagable by archers. *Yawn*
Am I the only one to think this game suffers from a relative lack of control on anything ? The only strategic (and what a shame, obvious) choice is to get a basic trishot frost+curse tower ASAP. After that, since I lack information about characteristics, ennemies and everything else, I just mindlessly combine rows of whatever stuff, spam towers as soon as I have 10 wood, upgrade with great entropy, and pause to put random gems/stuff everywhere. In hard mode.
Initially 2/5 for the effort. This was linear as hell. Then still 2/5 for the non-plot twist that was badly pulled and poorly written. then I pressed H in the title screen. 1/5.
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To be quite honest, I gave up on being a great writer a long time ago. I've since settled for aspiring to be a clear and concise one instead. So as long as the story meets the latter criteria, I'll still count it as a victory!