WP App Review : CastleMine Free

CastleMine Free (Version 1.1)
Diffraction Studios
$0.99 / Free

One of the more popular genres in smartphone games are tower defense games. CastleMine takes the standard tower defense formula but adds in a few nice features such as collecting various items during gameplay as well as adding a skill tree which you use to upgrade your towers as you progress through the game. As indicated by the title, it also takes a different approach in terms of how the game is viewed while played - instead of the usual fixed screen or side-scroll, your playing field expands downward into the ground as you protect your Castle.

In CastleMine, you protect the core of your tower which contains a certain amount of "stones". For each enemy that gets through you lose a stone and the game ends when you lose them all. The route of your enemies isn't pre-determined so you'll have to mine through the ground as you collect coins, support materials, relics, and skulls. There are also stones which block your path so at times you'll need to strategize between collecting everything or going after upgrade materials. You have access to three main towers - ice, fire, and lightning. Ice towers are fairly strong, fire towers have a high firing rate, and lightning has the ability to strike multiple enemies at once. When you have enough coins and support materials you can upgrade any of the towers. There are also support structures that when placed next to your main attack towers can grant an additional bonus such as increased damage and longer range.

You'll dig through the ground one "square" at a time and when you hit a specific area, a portal appears which starts a wave of enemies. As you progress further down, you'll eventually reach the end where the last wave of enemies appear. Once you've completed the stage you'll receive experience and skill points. You can use these skill points to upgrade your three towers via a skill tree which features a ton of various abilities such as more experience points, more gold, more damage, longer range, etc. This creates a bit of RPG element to the defense game and can get a bit addicting.

The game is a fun take on the standard tower defense game and currently features 50 stages in increasing difficulty. Game play is generally smooth with an occasional split-second graphic glitch when scrolling with a bunch of enemies on screen and graphics are simple and clean.

However, as you start playing you may notice that the rear of the phone gets extremely hot after a few minutes - more than any game I've tried so far. The game seems to hog up a lot of resources and therefore drains the battery pretty rapidly as well. This also contributes to game lag as you play longer. Aside from this unwanted hand-warmer feature, the game is entertaining and definitely one to try out if you're at all interested in tower defense games. Just don't plan on playing for long periods of time in one sitting.

Pros : Fresh take on tower defense, RPG element via upgradable skill tree
Cons : Runs extremely warm and drains battery quick