Negative Gamer Review: Horn Swaggle Islands (Xbox Indie Games)

I’ve never been keen on tower defence games. I’ve always been willing to give the games a go though so here’s Horn Swaggle Islands, the latest challenger to my tower defence opinion. Developers Pencel Games sent us a review token for this game, for which we’re very grateful.

The game is fairly standard tower defence fare, there are 12 different shaped islands which you have to keep pirates from crossing. To help you do this you have the usual array of weaponry including the fast but weak gun, the strong but slow gun and the super powerful weapon with the tiny range. How and where you use these will determine whether or not you keep the pirate hoards at bay.

On the main level select menu you can choose your difficulty, this largely determines the amount of money you get to start with. For a tower defence amateur like myself I found Captain (medium) difficulty way too difficult so I decided to play on Cabin Boy (easy). For a not-too-good player like myself I found this easy enough to play, but not easy enough to not make later levels a challenge. Once I had a handle on a set of tactics that seemed to work I stepped up to Captain for most of the levels.

The best form of attack…

Unlike normal tower defence games Horn Swaggle Islands has no predetermined path. Levels have a general route laid out and it’s left to you to block off shortcuts and alternate routes to try and funnel enemies along the longest possible path. Weapons are then mounted on these walls and that’s the first annoyance. Having to mount weapons only really serves to make them more expensive that they first appear. This becomes a real irritant when you go to build a new turret for the game to say you don’t have enough money.

Next problem is the game’s speed. Enemies move at a horrifically slow pace considering the size of the levels. In a decent sized maze it can take anything up to 4-5 minutes for enemies to get from one side to the other. Combine this with the fact that there are 44 waves of enemies per level and most maps will last upwards of 20-30 minutes. With no mid-level save system I found myself often getting rather bored by wave 30.

Yo ho ho and a cannonball up your ass

The map size itself is also an issue. Far from the small and confined maps used by most tower defence games Horn Swaggle Islands instead goes for large maps more fit to the design your own maze mechanic. The consequence of this is that the game severely lacks any sort of character. Enemies are tiny blobs of pixels with no varying abilities other than their health and speed. Fighting the exact same enemies in the exact same order on every map means that the levels don’t really get harder, only slightly different in terms of where you can build. This becomes a problem because once you realise that the same strategy will work on every map regardless of difficulty the game loses any challenge it might have had.

A few other points worth mentioning…

• The tiny enemy sprites can be hard to see even on a decent size HDTV. People with small TV’s will have to sit very close.
• There’s no music to speak of in the game, only wave and weapon effects make up the game’s soundtrack.

Overall Horn Swaggle Islands is a determinedly average tower defence game. Having to build your own route for enemies is a nice touch but suffers from losing the challenge inherent to a pre-made maze. It’s nothing particularly special but a welcoming tutorial and easy mode make it a good way for tower defence newbies to get started.

You should play this game if’¦

…you haven’t played a tower defence game before.

Final Score
Horn Swaggle Islands is a decent introduction to the genre, but veterans won’t be impressed.

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