Quick Review: Bomb Defense

Developed and published by Mithorah Games, Bomb Defense is about you protecting your kittens from hordes of dangerous enemies. Yes, kittens. Against the usual fantastical enemies you can think of. This game was released on July 5th, 2017.

Who needs an incentive to rescue a kitten?

If you were expecting a regular tower defense game (as I was), you will be disappointed. The game works more like a puzzle game than a strategy game; each level gives you a field with a safe area for the kitten, the locations the monsters come from, and various obstacles. You have a finite amount of money, and must set up traps on the way separating the monsters from your endangered kittens. There are few monsters in each level, and some of them begin to follow the path after a delay of a few seconds after the others. Your best weapons are bombs, flailing maces, and walls (to block paths).

Hm... I find nothing of interest here. Got any towers?

A demon now? Do I have a Doomguy in my inventory?

The paths can be fairly wide, so you need to set up your traps wisely. You've set the timer to a bomb and it went off too early or too late? Too bad! Set up a flail on the field, but the enemies avoided it? Too bad! The game is extremely reliant on trial and error, and you’ll be restarting most levels a couple times usually to fine-tune the position of each trap, the countdown in tenths of seconds of some explosives, etc. You would need some extreme luck to beat most of the later levels on the first try. And if you get pretty good, you can aim for the medals – see, you get better medals for beating a level by spending less than the amount you’re allotted for the level.

Of course they had to throw in red bars to show
where you can't build things.

The game offers 24 levels, and thus a pretty good selection if you so wish to see all this game has to offer. I personally didn’t really enjoy it. The game is very restrictive, something that I do understand considering the puzzle aspect of it (compared to the strategic aspect of proper Tower Defense titles, where you can build your traps and towers just the way you want to, gathering money from the waves of eemies killed). Bombs may fail to defeat an opponent if they’re so much as set by a few tenths of a second too early or two late, swinging maces can miss by a hair… I really don’t like that aspect. Everything may be perfectly set up and still fail.

Oh no! My kitten is dead!

The game, overall, feels pretty bland. Aside from the comical idea of defending not treasure, not artefacts, but kittens from waves of fantasy enemies, there isn’t much to discuss. The levels appear built out of pre-rendered assets, nothing really noteworthy. Same goes for the music, mostly ambiance and noises.

To be fair, this is this developer’s one of only two games, so I can see a lot of room for improvement. There’s a few good ideas in there, but it’s still pretty uninspired. I won’t be keeping this one. I also don’t think it’s worth the 5$ price tag. But hey, it’s out there if you feel like trying it.