Goal Defense

Summary

Tower Defense games are popular as ever, which also means that by now they're a dime a dozen. They're pefect for gamers who enjoy spending several hours playing but aren't looking for something that's too convoluted or complex.

A brand new star in the Tower Defense Milky Way: Goal Defense. Some of you may be familiar with it from iOS, and it has just recently been released for Android.
Rather than the usual cast of knights, plants, zombies, this game features athletes that have to battle it out against another team.

Find out more after the jump.

Test device: Samsung Galaxy Nexus 4.1.1

The Goal Defense gameplay is similar to that of most other Tower Defense games:

The goal of tower defense games is to try to stop enemies from crossing a map by building towers which shoot at them as they pass. Enemies and towers usually have varied abilities, costs, and ability costs. When an enemy is defeated, the player earns money or points, which are used to buy or upgrade towers, or upgrade the number of money or points that are earned, or even upgrade the rate at which they upgrade.
Quote: Wikipedia

Just cross out the word “tower” in your mind and you will get the gist of almost every TDG.

When you start up Goal Defense the first thing you will see is the main menu via which you may select an episode or access the settings, as well as start a game, natch.
This is also where you can access the shop; use diamonds to purchase athletes or bonus points. You can also sell your diamonds via Google Play.

Within the game itself you'll find the following options:

• Account and diamond info: Check here to see how much moolah and diamonds you can currently call your own.
• Paus and shop: Pause the game or switch to the shop.
• Available athletes: Look to the bottom right to see how many players are currently available and if you have enough money to buy them.
• Game speed and remaining attacks: Change the game's pace and see how many power punches you've got left.

More obstacles pop up on the game field to keep things interesting. Each round features more attacks by your opponents, and they get tougher with every new round.

The game's main drawback (in this category): multitasking is rendered difficult to impossible. By this I mean you can forget about pausing the game to answer an email and then resuming where you left off. The app starts up from the beginning and you have to play a round all over again.
This is especially frustrating in light of how well Android ordinarily lends itself to multitasking.

Bottom line:

Goal Defense is a fairly classic Tower Defense game, but one with a fun new twist and great graphics. Plus, there are 40 levels to get through, so if you the game you don't risk completing it prematurely.

The glitch I discussed is a rather annoying one, which is why, for now, we are rating this app as “good” in this category.
 

Goal Defense performed very well on the Galaxy Nexus. Controls are good and so is the game's design. Even finding the tips throughout a game did not prove to be a problem.
We tip our hats to the developers and hope that other game devs find inspiration in Goal Defense's fun graphics.

Goal Defense is stabile but it takes a while to load between levels and menu options. There's room for improvement here.

Goal Defense is free and available – sans ads! - from Google Play. While I like the app, I'm awarding it three stars in this category – for now – in light of some of the glitches that are still present in this very new release.