Fortified! Review
By Lee Marcussen
Blast Off
When I was browsing upcoming games I came across Fortified! It caught my eye because I'm a big fan of tower defense style games. Stretching back to monkey balloon tower defense and to our more recent review of Toy Soldiers: War Chest. Seeing the trailer of Fortified! Got me excited for a new tower defense game, but what really interested me was your ability to have a standalone character to play as while maintaining your defenses.
The game takes place in the 1950s where you’re fighting off alien Martians with your character or your defensive units while trying to defend a rocket ship. There are four different characters having all different weapons and special abilities. These special abilities are earned while playing and killing enemies as a meter builds up allowing you to use said heroes power. The Captain is kind of a gung-ho run and gun style character with his special ability allowing him to be invulnerable, have artillery fire come down on enemies, and give infantry defenses increased damage. The Rocket Scientist is best described as a demolitions/explosives type character using grenade launchers. Her heroic ability allows her to be invulnerable to enemy fire, deploys a jet pack that allows her to fly around, and she has unlimited ammo! Next is the spaceman, who reminds me of Mr.Freeze from Batman. His heroic power is invulnerability against enemies and being able to freeze all nearby ones. Finally, you have the Agent whose heroic ability allows him to become invulnerable and his weapons have increased damage. All of these characters come with a set of two weapons that have upgrades for different power-ups. As you complete missions and level up you'll receive tokens that allow you to unlock new defenses, defense upgrades, weapons, and weapon upgrades.
The game takes place in the 1950s where you’re fighting off alien Martians with your character or your defensive units while trying to defend a rocket ship. There are four different characters having all different weapons and special abilities. These special abilities are earned while playing and killing enemies as a meter builds up allowing you to use said heroes power. The Captain is kind of a gung-ho run and gun style character with his special ability allowing him to be invulnerable, have artillery fire come down on enemies, and give infantry defenses increased damage. The Rocket Scientist is best described as a demolitions/explosives type character using grenade launchers. Her heroic ability allows her to be invulnerable to enemy fire, deploys a jet pack that allows her to fly around, and she has unlimited ammo! Next is the spaceman, who reminds me of Mr.Freeze from Batman. His heroic power is invulnerability against enemies and being able to freeze all nearby ones. Finally, you have the Agent whose heroic ability allows him to become invulnerable and his weapons have increased damage. All of these characters come with a set of two weapons that have upgrades for different power-ups. As you complete missions and level up you'll receive tokens that allow you to unlock new defenses, defense upgrades, weapons, and weapon upgrades.
There are also different defense units and weapons you can use. I like to break it down to soldier style defenses, automated turrets, and a trap style unit. The soldier style defenses include an infantry unit, rocket launcher unit, a sort of shock trooper or tesla trooper that shoots out lightning, and a sniper unit. You can also command these human turrets to follow you, defend a different place other than their turret bunker or return back to the base to defend. The automated turrets are just that, there is a machine gun style, anti-air, anti-tank, and a missile style launcher. The trap style defenses differ as there are ones that freeze enemies, set flames to them, and ones that launch them into the air. I really like the different style of defenses that allow you to customize them the way you want. Typically the characters have different weapons than eachother. Generally they all have a missile style launcher, shotgun, and submachine gun, but they have different specialty weapons like the Spaceman has a freeze gun where the others don’t. As I mentioned before, these can all be upgraded as well with the unlock points.
The campaign is set up with missions that send waves of enemies to attack. In the beginning of each level you can pick up to two weapons and secure up to six turret spots. This allows you to put the turrets in whatever order you want for quickness of building them in battle (personally, I like to put them in order of the least to greatest costs). After you have your turrets set up you can then launch the waves. Each wave gets harder as the rounds go on, introducing varied enemies and attacks as well. The Martians put up a fight and you can die from them, but the part I like is you can respawn after a certain amount of time where other games of this style tend to have you lose the level. Between each wave, you have time to build, sell or re-position your turrets which is really helpful for getting set up for the next wave. The third person gameplay is very nice as it allows you to see enemies around you and I really enjoy this style of play. The turrets are very useful and are what I would call smart. Some games with turret defenses suck and don’t shoot at enemies but in Fortified! They work excellent. As you advance to higher levels in the campaign the maps get more challenging with different enemy drop zones and multiple ways to attack your rocket ship. After some levels, there are cut scenes that are presented in a 50's era comic book style animation that really give you an authentic feel. With campaign being a big part of the game there is the survival mode too, giving you two simpler maps. This survival mode reminds me of the “Horde” mode in the Gears of War series where its nonstop enemies attacking in huge waves.
Overall I really do enjoy this game as a whole, I love the idea behind it and the mechanics of it as well. Clapfoot really put together a really solid game powered by the Unreal Engine 4. This game is very well detailed in animations and fighting. Fortified! can get very fast paced as you get higher in the levels. It is simple yet still very challenging as you progress. I did not get a chance to really play any of the co-op style play. Not sure if it was because I got the game early in the release or my poor internet which didn’t allow me to play but once I get some play time on that I will update this review. There honestly was not much to dislike when it came to the title. There is a limit on how many human soldier turrets you can have and I’m unsure for this but you can have as many automated turrets as you can afford. Another simple con would be the limited dialogue your character has. Each character says about three different lines throughout battles which gets repetitive after a while. Regardless, I really enjoyed this game and hope there is more to come from Clapfoot.
Overall I really do enjoy this game as a whole, I love the idea behind it and the mechanics of it as well. Clapfoot really put together a really solid game powered by the Unreal Engine 4. This game is very well detailed in animations and fighting. Fortified! can get very fast paced as you get higher in the levels. It is simple yet still very challenging as you progress. I did not get a chance to really play any of the co-op style play. Not sure if it was because I got the game early in the release or my poor internet which didn’t allow me to play but once I get some play time on that I will update this review. There honestly was not much to dislike when it came to the title. There is a limit on how many human soldier turrets you can have and I’m unsure for this but you can have as many automated turrets as you can afford. Another simple con would be the limited dialogue your character has. Each character says about three different lines throughout battles which gets repetitive after a while. Regardless, I really enjoyed this game and hope there is more to come from Clapfoot.
Final Score: 8.5/10
|
+Unique style of play and concept
+Easy to play +Defenses customization to how you want them +Co-op play |
-Repetitive character sayings
-Limit on human turrets |
Release Date: 2/3/2016
Developer: Clapfoot Inc.
Publisher: Clapfoot Inc.