Aside from 2-D platformers like “Super Mario Bros.,” there may be no genre as naturally engrossing as tower defense. This little slice of gaming dates back at least to “Missile Command,” which had no towers but defined tower defense’s immutable rules: Waves of enemies are coming at a target, and you must defend it. A million approaches have been taken to tower defense since, from the botanical carnage of “Plants vs. Zombies” to online games where you defend your castle by grabbing assailants with the mouse and flinging them into the air.
It’s hard to believe that after all this, the best game in the history of the genre comes from Double Fine Productions, an outfit known for humor games like last year’s heavy metal sendup “Brutal Legend,” starring Jack Black.
An even happier surprise is the game’s main gimmick: “Trenched” isn’t just tower defense — you are the tower. The game has you pilot what is essentially a bunker with legs, complete with sandbags to protect your character ludicrously seated at the top. This fantasia of midcentury war machinery is incredibly fun to control, sprinting around the battlefield to blast robot scorpions.
| ‘Trenched’ |
| » System: Xbox 360 |
| » Price: $15 |
| » Rating: 5 out of 5 stars |
“Trenched” gives you a great diversity of mechs to pilot, and customizing them with specialized machine guns, grenade launchers, sniper rifles and cannons is a micromanager’s dream come true. Team up with three friends online, and the possibilities for joint efforts are staggering.
The game’s only flaw is a proponderance of “fog” to mask graphical limitations. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect top-flight graphics from a game available strictly via download from Xbox Live, but this smacks of the Nintendo 64 era.
Still, it’s a small price to pay when it comes to perhaps the best downloadable game of this generation.
