Hello again my fellow Time Wasters!
It’s that time again, and I’m here to report on what game I found myself picking up after the apocalypse storm that happened last weekend.
Being without light and internet for several days, at first the prospect of playing a new castle defense game tickled my fancy. After all, I really enjoy castle defense games. But all too quickly my hopes dwindled even before the game had begun when I saw errors in instructional wording and a story that I’m still trying to make sense of present themselves. It only took to level three for my hopes to be gone completely.
You play Duncan, a republic soldier who, after seeing zombies on the television, goes to arms to defend the castle against whatever is thrown at it (and I really mean whatever, since zombies are not the game’s main enemy since you’ve got demon bats and dragons flying at you as well). I’m not going to be picky about story though since you don’t really need one in castle defense games.
After the game begins you quickly find out that the only way to keep zombies from reaching you at their fast pace is with a headshot. That makes sense right? They’re zombies, of course you shoot them in the head.
And through levels one and two you get the hang of aiming so that zombies no longer become a problem. But then level three turns up and you are introduced to the bat demon things I mentioned before. This is exactly where my good gaming experience stopped and the brokenness of the game shined through.
Approaching at a somewhat slower pace than the zombies, I figured that I could kill them before they reached me. Maybe they had a headshot point that would take maybe two hits this time instead of one. Nope. Even if I started shooting the bat when it first appeared, it nearly reached me by the time it was dead. This let the bats that came out right after the first one still have full health when being at my castle doors. Not to mention that the fast paced zombies are still coming at me the entire time I’m trying to take out one bat.
Dodging between two windows at different levels, I fought to keep my castle from getting taken over, but every time the castle took a hit from an enemy, Duncan flinched and couldn’t shoot his gun.
You know how many chances you get to shoot when you have at least four enemies (mainly those tanks in the form of bats) constantly hitting you?
Not many.
And with every shot I could get off going into the head of a growing zombie hoard, the bats just ate happily away at my health completely undisturbed.
With guns that have no visible difference in power level, bats that are too tanky to be killed quickly, a mismatch in the speed of approaching enemies to their strength, and an inability to defend yourself when you’re too busy flinching, this game needs a serious revamp in order to be playable. It has potential, but needs fixed in order to realize it. As it stands now, to quote the game itself: ‘Duncan has Failed.’
Duncan Castle Defense gets 1 GiN gem out of 5.