Sneak Peak: Multiplayer Desktop Tower Defense, Your Favorite New Timewaster

Desktop Tower Defense is the latest in a long string of “tower defense” games. Tower defense is a genre that got it’s start in Blizzard Entertainment’s classic Starcraft. The basic premise is you have growing waves of “creeps” that travel across your screen and you must prevent them from reaching their destination by building and upgrading various types of towers.

In some tower defense games, the creeps follow a predetermined path and you must build your towers to attack them along those paths. In Desktop Tower Defense, you build a maze with your towers and the creeps travel through it and are attacked during their travels. With each increasing level, the creeps become stronger and more difficult. It may start out easy, but it sure doesn’t stay that way. Also, the game has a leaderboard and displays the best mazes that other players have built.

Surprisingly addictive, the single player version of Desktop Tower Defense has received a lot of notice from big name writers like Michael Arrington and Jeremy Zawodny, and now from MacApper!

However, single player wasn’t enough and the guys at the newly formed Casual Collective has built a multi-player version of Desktop Tower Defense. It’s mostly the same game as the single player version, with a few small changes. There are a number of ’super-powers’ that you can attack your fellow players with and instead of the next level of creeps appearing after a set interval, the next level appears when the first player in your game finishes that particular level, so it’s to your advantage, at least for a while, to kill creeps quickly. At later stages of the game, you may not have your maze ready to kill the more advanced creeps.

On the right hand side of the screen, you can see the status of the other players in the game, how many lives they have left, how much gold they have and how many creeps are on their screen. In addition, clicking on their names will show you what their current maze looks like! Useful for using super powers, which are discussed later.

Fun for up to 12 players, it’s highly addictive, and when it’s out of beta (which should be soon), I know you’ll all enjoy it as much as I do! Sign up for a username at the Casual Collective website and be notified as soon as the game comes out of beta.

Desktop Tower Defense has a number of different types of towers, and various ones are available depending on whether you are playing easy, normal or hard modes:

Pellet Tower - This tower is a slow tower that fires bullets. It can be upgraded into a long-range Sniper Tower. Attacks air and ground.

Squirt Tower - A sort of upgraded Pellet Tower. It fires more quickly but is less powerful. It can be upgraded into a high-speed Typhoon Tower that is the mainstay of my offense. Attacks air and ground.

Dart Tower - I didn’t use the Dart Tower much in the beginning, but I’ve started to enjoy it more and more. The Dart Tower shoots a missile at enemy targets. When it hits, it damages it’s target and whatever enemies are in the immediate vicinity. If you design your maze appropriately, you can get your creeps to bunch up together and the Dart Tower can be come very effective. It upgrades into a ICBM Tower that has a long range and strong attack. It attacks ground only.

Swarm Tower - This tower is for attacking the flying creeps that show up every 8 levels or so. They shoot four missiles at once very quickly and are devastating against the flying creeps. Usually after the second flying creep level, you NEED to build these to survive them. They can be upgraded into ridiculously powerful Storm Towers. Air attacks only.

Frost Tower - Frost Towers don’t do a lot of damage, but they do slow down creeps. If you’ve got a number of towers near each other, you want to keep your creeps in the kill zone. Frost towers help with that considerably. They can be upgraded into Blizzard Towers. These attack air and ground units.

Bash Tower - Bash Towers attack units in their immediate area. They only fire every few seconds, but placed properly they can do tremendous damage and take out many units at once. They are expensive, but can be upgraded into a Quake tower that will take out most everything in their path. Bash Towers attack ground units only.

Ink Towers - These are peculiar towers that took me a while to understand how to utilize them effectively. It has a kill zone set in a ring around it that it launches blobs of “ink” into. You must design your maze carefully to take advantage of it’s abilities, but when done correctly, the ink blobs can quickly neutralize creeps. It can be upgraded into an Ink-Blot Tower. Ground attack only.

Snap Tower - Snap Towers are single shot remote controlled bombs. You can place them around the map and when triggered they will do devastating damage to creeps in the area. They upgrade to Spike Towers. Attacks air and ground units.

Boost Tower - Boost Towers increase the damage of other towers immediately around them. Used carefully, they can tip the balance of power in your game.

Adding to the variety, Desktop Tower Defense has a number of types of creeps:

Normal - Your standard dot of death moving across the screen. Nothing special here.

Immune - These creeps can’t be slowed by Frost Towers.

Group - Group Creeps are stacked on top of each other and are released simultaneously rather than more spread out. If they get by your towers it can be difficult to kill them.

Fast - As the name suggests, Fast Creeps move much more quickly across your maze than the others.

Spawn - Spawn Creeps split into smaller creeps when shot. At later levels, they can split several times, making for some pain-in-the-neck creep action.

Flying - These creeps fly straight over your maze giving you limited time to kill them.

Also, every so many levels, you have a ‘boss’ creep that is super-strong and difficult to kill.

New in the multiplayer version are Super-Powers! These can really shift the balance of power in the game if you use them carefully! You are awarded one point for each level that passes, and you spend can spend them on various powers.

Light - This power blacks out one of your opponents for 5 seconds and prevents them from building or seeing what’s going on.

Gold-Lock - This power prevents one of your opponents from buying or upgrading their towers for 10 seconds.

Silence - You can pick one type of tower that your opponent is using and silence it for a few seconds. Can make the difference if they are using one particular type of tower.

Defense - Prevents your opponents from using any attacks on you for 10 seconds.

Nuke - Kills everything on your screen! Great for when you’re getting overwhelmed… if you’ve saved up enough points.

You can play the single player version NOW and register your username so that you’re ready to play the multiplayer version when it’s released. Also, look for an interview with Paul and Dave, the creators of Desktop Tower Defense soon!