After being available on Steam for three and a half months, Revenge of the Titans has gone retail with the added bonus of a soundtrack on the disk and a large limited edition poster, so while you get a couple of extras, the game is obviously still the same, but what is it about?
There are many tower defence games out there competing for your attention, now to let you know how this one should deserve the pennies from your pocket. Fun graphics and sound are a good start, if you’re going to commit a substantial amount of time to a game, you want to enjoy it and there’s nothing more enjoyable than something nice to look at and listen to.
Upon opening the game for a second time, I’m prompted to give an email address to receive $7500 of in-game cash, now, while I’m not a promoter of newsletters as I find them a form of spam, you always have the option of unsubscribing and you could always use a spare email address used predominantly for spam. By the way, you WILL need a working email address to put the code that you receive into the game.
One of the differences with Revenge of the Titans is that as you complete each stage, you get the chance to research for new and better equipment, what makes things a little harder is that you can only choose one thing to research each time, so your success depends on what you open up.
Improving weapons and technology is what will help keep away those darned Titans and the better your weapons, the less you need to place to take out the smaller ones, the main thing to remember is that they only start arriving after you place the first refinery, so you can set up some turrets before placing the refinery.
The difficulty isn’t too bad to start out with and comfortably introduces you to the game with low-level Titans coming at you, but in typical fashion as is with tower defense games, it gradually and thankfully, slowly gets harder with progression. While placing equipment in strategic places becomes more obvious, things also become tougher as you have to place more expensive blasters which penetrate armour, trying to keep costs down can be a problem and just adds to the challenge.
The big question though is, is this really worth full retail price? Unfortunately, not everyone has Steam and if they do, may not have a way of making payment, leading to resorting to buying retail and having to pay a percentage more than from the digital download service. While Revenge of the Titans has nice visuals and decent sound, I would have to say that if you can buy it from Steam, that would be the option of preference.
It’s quite a short game once you work out how to manage finances by keeping things to a minimum and refining as much element as possible, I have to admit to being quite poor at this type of game, so it takes a fair bit longer for me to get better results. If you get frustrated quite easy, this may not be the game for you, then again, I could say the tower defence genre isn’t for you as they’re basically the same style of gameplay.
Talking of gameplay, one of the bonuses of games like this is replayability, being able to play through the levels again can help you improve as you work out different strategies although, the problem I had, was still researching the same stuff due to thinking I needed to go the same route.
Starting on Earth, you have to go through 10 levels of oncoming Titans, once those are vanquished, you move on to the Moon to defeat another 10 waves, then to Mars, Saturn and the home of the enemy, Titan. So that gives you 50 levels in total, but that’s just the Campaign Mode, you also have an ‘Endless’ mode in which you go through levels of increasing difficulty to see how long you can go on for before it all gets too much to handle.
Survival mode is rather self-explanatory, go for as long as you can before succumbing to the inevitable overload of enemies and if you last the longest, your score will go online as the time to beat. An interesting aspect to the Survival mode is you can choose which planet (or difficulty), terrain and map size you want to play on, so there’s the choice of how you want to play.
Revenge of the Titans Verdict
Since this is a review of the retail version, I should mention that the soundtrack which is included on the disk consists of MP3 files for you to transfer on to your computer of portable player. Considering that the soundtrack has only six tracks and is pretty much just the music you hear in the background of the game, it’s not particularly a spectacular addition and therefore, hardly justifies the retail price.
Even with a limited edition poster (which is actually quite big) and a desktop wallpaper in four resolutions (on the disk), the fact that (and I know this shouldn’t really matter) the game is only 120 MB leaves me feeling like I’ve been short-changed.
I would recommend buying this from Steam rather than the retail version, the ‘bonus material’ doesn’t justify the price and yet, the game is an enjoyable, worthwhile addition to the genre.