Once upon a time, the tower defence genre was invented; it proved to be such a huge success, game developers across the world attempted to polish the winning formula to their own beliefs and expectations. One of the more unorthodox, if not still one of the best, is plants vs zombies; now to hopefully pry that thorny crown away, Namco Bandai and Lightmare Studios have unleashed the alien horde with ‘Beware Planet Earth!’
For those who’ve never garnered their attention towards a tower defence style game, the premise is simple, yet the execution can be far from it. Usually, there’s a certain path of which the enemies must traverse; it’s up to you to stop them by placing turrets and other intrinsic defences adjacent to the path, in the vain hope that the enemy doesn’t reach their objective. Beware Planet Earth works no differently to the normal format, if you’ve played one before, you’ll know exactly what you’re getting into.
With such a standardised arrangement to these games, you’d be forgiven in thinking that ideas may generally be recycled from other games. Mostly that would be the case, however certain parallels with Plants vs Zombies, do seem to discernibly crop up more than you might deem necessary. The overall visual styling of the game with its cartoony look, bubbly design and colourful overtones scream of PopCap’s classic; it doesn’t end there. Instead of Crazy Dave, you get a poor fellow who’s trapped inside an outdoor latrine, but don’t worry, he’s still a little wacky. The plant selection screen and subsequent enemy checker screen are almost identical, as are the resemblances to some of the weapons you can deploy, such as the ‘not spud mine’. Now I’m all for dotting around some sly nods to games, but there is a limit.
Aside from the almost plagiaristic visual tones, Beware Planet Earth stands rather proudly as a game, the mechanics are solid, the weapons are varied enough and each successive map provides a unique challenge from the last. Due to most of the weapons having a rather, expectedly, meagre range, the usual challenge at the start of each map becomes the placement of your precious, yet offensively useless money/cog generators. You must quickly decide whether to build many at the start and forgo some aggressive placements in favour of selling them at a later date, or just keep a few secure and off the beaten path. Some certain enemy types will further increase the difficulty of this due to their special abilities. There’s a martian maid who doesn’t at all remind me of Consuela from Family Guy, who’ll hoover up your precious cogs should you let her. It’s not only her that makes life difficult either, due to the varied enemy types, you’ll encounter aliens that can pop shield bubbles around themselves and others that should be zapped away with the selectable ray gun as soon as possible.
The ray gun itself provides an interesting balancing act as you can do damage to enemies; even kill them outright with it, so long as you keep in mind that excessive use will make it overheat, and therefore be potentially useless when it’s actually needed. As is the case with some of the more sneaky types such as those who cannot be targeted by your defences (due to their incredulous disguise techniques) until you’ve given them a short blast with your trusty hand laser. Not only that, but you can also execute the risk/reward technique of super powering your defences, at the expense of them going offline for a while afterwards. It would be nice if there was a keyboard shortcut to the gun for use in those particularly hairy situations, but then that’s probably half the fun! Along with the generic adventure mode and all the bells and whistles it provides, there are also challenges and other things to keep you busy long after completion; even that is no joke due to the optional Veteran mode that can make the game a lot more difficult should you opt for it.
As far as the game goes, it runs smoothly enough; will encounter no problems, even with fairly old hardware. This is a good job really as there are no visual or performance settings at all, which unfortunately raises the issue of it being, for some reason, in 4:3, with no way to change it. It simply doesn’t feel right, especially in this day and age to have the ol’ black lines down either side of the screen. The sound effects and music, whilst fairly standard for this genre, work well, but you’ll probably get a little tired of them long before the credits roll.
All in all, Beware Planet Earth is a solid entry in the tower defence genre and harbours its own little twists whilst implementing them seamlessly; if you haven’t had your fill of it by now, it’s a great place to rekindle your love for it. Being available on Steam also has its benefits too, with it, you can bag yourself some new levels, martians, exclusive valve content and a few cheeky secret achievements. Unfortunately, some issues do spoil it a little, such as its debatably unoriginal looks and presentation accompanied with its reluctance to join the 16:9 crowd.
