Codex Worlds is attempting to bring a fresh take on tower defense games with their latest title, Infinium Strike. Funded through Kickstarter, this indie title is puts you in the boots of a weapons officer on the starship Freedom Strike tasked with eliminating an enemy known as the Wrog. A recent demo release on Steam has given us a taste of the team’s labor.
At first when I started it up I was a bit skeptical from what I had heard about this game, that it was supposed to be a revolution in the tower defense style genre. But I was pleasantly surprised with what I found. A game that did not just limit you to one standard route but instead it makes you worry about four different fronts, and at the same time build proper cannons and summon attack ships to attack the Wrog and multiple ranges.
As for the actual gameplay itself, it felt like your standard tower defense game. You build a turret here to counteract this ship, you build one here to kill this ship. So it gives you a feeling of comfort with doing something that you know. After the short intro they start to spawn ships in the areas or Quadrants that the game calls them and you have to now worry about ships on multiple fronts. This is an interesting feature because your turrets in one area have no effect on the other, so you have to rebuild specifically for each section and hope you are successful. As for the current demo there was only one major issue I had which was turret placement. When selecting a site to place a turret on they had three different ways to do it. One was by clicking directly on the ship itself then selecting a turret and hoping it gets place properly, this was the worst way to place turrets. Then there was the second option which was selecting the turret menu the clicking on a turret then the space on the ship which worked almost all the time. The final way which seemed to be full proof was clicking on these little blue squares on the right side of the screen which selected a different spot and executed turret placement one hundred percent of the time. But with the third option they do not mention it until you play the advanced tutorial.
Overall I would say that this game is something to look forward to on the horizon, it has smooth gameplay, the mechanics are implemented properly with what it seems like they are shooting for, and the most important thing, is that it is bringing something new to the tower defense genre. While a release date has not been announced the dev team is aiming for a window of Q2 in 2016. I am excited to see what the devs do for the full release.
sector2.org 