Defenders of Ardania – Review

Defenders of Ardania by Paradox Interactive has been a very enjoyable experience for me to play. The campaign is full of humorous references and little jokes, which add to the overall flavour of the game. As well as this you have a story, fairly typical, ancient undead evil trying to ruin your good times and steal your dwarven beer, of two rival kingdoms fighting it out for fun and profit.

If you’ve ever played a Tower War style map in Warcraft or Starcraft, then you will have no trouble picking up Defenders of Ardania. For those completely new to the genre there is a very good ‘ease in’ approach to the campaign that will unlock features as you advance, showing you how to play with a brief tutorial.

From there in campaign you go through a series of increasingly difficult missions (all ranked for difficulty and are re-playable if you want to play again and try out different strategies.
The in-game interface is quite clean, with all the menus for troops and upgrades available from a single right click, and from each other as tabs to make switching between menus quick and easy.

The game also features some other mechanics interesting and so far as I have seen specific to the game. The ability to target certain objectives in a multiple objective (eg 2v2) game makes for some interesting dynamics, I would assume with a bit of co-ordination this could be used to demolish opposing teams, and while you can’t manually target units with your turrets, there is a feature called “bounty” to make your targets hit one specific unit.

The graphics were fairly nice, not state of the art perhaps, but suitable for this kind of setting. One feature I did enjoy was the way you had to expand your area of influence by building towers to build further out from your city. It’s a novel concept and causes something of a strategic importance in destroying key towers when available in order to cut back the enemies influence area to just the bare minimum.
The area of influence sounds awkward, but Paradox fixed that with a handy Grid view (F1) that will show each slot you can build towers in as well as your current area of influence, and places you cannot build in due to either being an enemy safe zone, or it being the only place the minions can go to proceed.

There are a couple of downsides to the game unfortunately. First you can’t see what impact an upgrade will have on your tower without going through with it, so you never really know if it’s going to be worth the money at that stage of the game until it’s already too late. The only other big issue that I found with the game so far, is when attempting to play a multiplayer game, I couldn’t start a lobby that another player could join, as well as I wasn’t able to join any other players lobby.

Still, for the $15 you can get it from via the Steam store, this isn’t a bad purchase to have a bit of fun with, and if they can get the few issues fixed, then this will be a very interesting game to play, though a fair warning to all considering this, some of the games can take quite a while. I’ve had single maps last 1+ hours so far, no small amount of which is due to the fact that both players have access to a heal spell for their base on a cooldown.
Now as a bonus to this article, we have a giveaway for a free key for Defenders of Ardania. To enter simply answer this question in the comments section of this review, and I will be selecting the answer I find the most interesting/amusing as the winner to receive a free key:
Come up with a new wizard rank, like Master of Pillowfight and what skill would that wizard have?

If you don’t win this, don’t worry as we have a few more key giveaways planned, so keep your eyes peeled on either Facebook or Twitter. Competition will close on Thursday the 19th of April (GMT+10) So you will know if you have won by Friday. The winner will be notified by Facebook/here