Hero Defense - Haunted Island Impressions

Hero Defense is based around defending various locations upon the Haunted Island in a tower defense type game. What makes this title stand out from the usual tower crowd is that it's one of the active ones and it has you directly controlling your heroes which are basically just turrets. You get a solid squad of five differing units which each have their own unique abilities to bring for the team. You meet up with each of them as you progress through the story and learn their abilities on the way. Each of them complement the others in a differing way so you'll need to watch for the right situations to match them up. The characters also have special abilities that are charged by the collection of blue orbs that fallen enemies release and this is reset each match. The game also does a great job in making them very distinct and having a very colorful group of characters to use. These designs also match the environments well as it has a really well done and nice cartoon art style to it which looks great. It has a spooky feel to it, but still feels like a lighter hearted game.





The game runs like most classic tower defense with waves of enemies moving along paths though this one twists the formula a bit by granting you these moving towards as heroes. In every map there are many highlighted green areas that you can move each of the heroes to at any time and special sections that grant additional bonuses to the characters. This is helpful since you need to constantly adapt to the waves and shift things for the bosses that show up every so often. So far I've certainly enjoyed the portions of the game I played across a number of levels though wish it would make the roster of characters available earlier as the tutorial is a tad slower than it should be. The wave pace is decent enough and there's good balancing when it comes to the enemies you face at a time though it can be overwhelming if the wave is not planned well in the short break between. I also liked them using the first town you meet as a base of operations, despite being burned to the ground when you arrive you're able to purchase the buildings required to rebuild it all. This area is where you're able to select skills and build new equipment to help you along the campaign. Overall the game was a decent tower defense title that aims to do something different which is good, but I didn't quite like the pace of the tutorial area as it was far too slow. Aside from that you can check out some of the earlier levels below to get an idea of how the game runs. Would also like to mention that this game is on Steam Early Access so it will definitely getting changes over development like all these sort of titles. Note: video removed.

Impressions Made on Hero Defense - Haunted Island during Steam Early Access