A polished TD game with hidden complexities
I've played a lot of Tower Defense over the years here on Newgrounds. And while the Gemcraft series is still my hands-down favorite, along comes Juicy Beast with a surprisingly compelling contender for second place. While appearing to be a standard by-the-numbers TD on the surface, Bloom Defender combines subtly deep elemental spellcasting with a cheerful aesthetic into one solid, professional-looking package.
The first thing you'll notice after the JuicyBeast logo (which lasts way too long for a logo, BTW, and is probably the lion's share of why this didn't get a 10...) is the story sequence. While the story itself is perfunctory, it gives you a close-up look at the elemental creeps you'll be fighting in this game. They're cartoony, they're stylish, and each and every one of them is well-designed with a ton of personality.
Once you start playing, you'll notice how streamlined the clicking is. The action is seperated into a build phase and a combat phase, with player input required to start the next wave. While this does remove one element of risk from the game, it means that a single-click is context-sensitive. You never need to tell the game WHAT you're trying to do... never need to open a menu or toggle between build and spell modes, it's just always point and click, and the right thing happens. This simplicity of interface is so welcome and refreshing, especially on a platform where there is no right-click, that it more than makes up for my one criticism about the game.
And that's that the core gameplay is almost too busy. I generally like my TD games to be largely hands-off once I get my combo set up, and Bloom Defender is very much a spell-centric game. You need to constantly cast spells, all the time, in every level. So why do I rate the game so highly if that's not my cup of tea?
Because Bloom Defender does it *just right.* There's no rock-paper-scissors, just two sets of two elements that cancel each other. The game throws two sets of elemental mobs at you at a time, along with non-elemental mobs that are weak against ice de-facto because of its effects on movement. Elemental Mobs have shortcuts they can take through most levels, which both influences your positioning of towers and results in unusual shifting overlaps between enemies. Later levels challenge you to make the best possible use of the plants it gives you. You'll find yourself building whole strategies around unlikely combinations, simply because those are the only tools the game gives you. And because it was well-planned and carefully balanced, it works.
It's not perfect. The blue flower almost always does the most damage, and will figure prominently in most of your strategies. It's very tricky to get the pink flowers to pay off. Ice enemies tend to spread apart for no apparent reason. Although all enemies take damage from all elements, it's sometimes hard to shake the feeling that you're being penalized for using any spell other than the one you're "supposed to." The fact that it hides the raw numbers from you means you can't prove it's not leading the player around by the nose. And it quickly becomes obvious that "Elemental Weaknesses" is actually code for "Immune to everything but that one spell."
That said, this game was clearly never meant to be intricate or crunchy. Instead, it focuses on doing one thing, and doing it extremely well. Bloom Defender is pure and simple TD gameplay with hidden complexities and a clean aftertaste. It is well-paced, methodical, and a pleasure to grind through. You remain engaged in the process of attacking your enemies at all times, and that's before we even mention the bosses, which are a joy to fight and totally carry both the gameplay and the character design through to their logical conclusions.
Definitely a must-play, especially for TD fans.
