In Desktop Tower Defense, your objective is to stop the lines of “Creeps” from crossing the desk. They go from one side to the other, though in some difficulty levels, there is more than one line of enemies.

To stop them from crossing the board, you place “towers” with various abilities to zap them before they get to their destination. For every creep that you miss, you lose one of your lives. For every Creep you zap, you get points and gold. Gold is used for buying/upgrading towers.

The tower types are

• The Pellet Tower, which is the cheapest of the towers. It fires reasonably fast, and it’s damage levels are okay. It’s cheap, so start with this one.
• The Squirt Tower fires real fast, but doesn’t damage the creeps much.
• The Dart Tower is the heavy artillery. It’s not exactly cheap, and it fires slowly, but it packs a punch.
• The Swarm Tower fires a group of four tracer missiles to take out flying creeps.
• The Frost Tower slows your opponents so your other towers can do their work.
• The Bash Tower repeatedly emits a shockwave to seriously reduce the health of nearby creeps.

When you start the game, you’re given a chance to pick your level of difficulty. Easy has only one line of creeps, and a sizable portion of money; Medium has two lines of creeps; Hard has two lines as well…and you only get 50% of the standard lives. Then there are the sets of Challenge and Fun modes. Challenge modes are for total experts, and Fun modes are for frustrated players who want to have some fun. I recommend starting with Easy,and moving up to Medium when you’re ready.

Upon selecting your Level of Difficulty, you’re taken to the Desk. You’re given 80 Gold to place some initial towers (click on tower type, then click on the board to place). After you’ve used-up your 80 Gold, press the Start button.

The Creeps will start coming in waves of various types. The first seven waves of Creeps will be “normal” ones. Then there will be a Boss Creep with insane health levels. Next there will be “Group Creeps” that keep near each other instead of spreading out. Next come the “Immunes”, which are more resilient to your weaponry. Then you have extra fast ones, and so on. I haven’t covered all of the Creep types, and the order varies depending on your difficulty level.

To win, you have to keep placing new towers in strategic positions, and upgrading existing ones. To upgrade towers, simply select one (by clicking it) and choose the “upgrade” option to the right. Game play continues until you are out of lives.

Can you defeat the Creeps, and go all the way to level 50? Desktop Tower Defense is a fun and addicting puzzle game. Let’s see if you can figure out how to zap all the Creeps. If you find an interesting strategy, feel free to share it in the comments.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 8:53 am by Matt and is filed under Beginner's Guides, Flash Games, PC/Mac, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.