DLC Note: This game is slated to have a variety of downloadable content. The review below only covers the ’base game’; the playable segment you get for 1000 Wii Points from the Wii Shop Channel.
I am not very fond of tower defense games, as I feel the genre is as oversaturated today as first person shooters and 2D fighting games were back in the 90s. But My Life as a Darklord does a solid job with the concept, and I found I was able to mostly overcome my dislike for the genre and have fun. Darklord’s premise is simple, putting you in control of a mobile tower that starts off with only the bare minimum of features. You’re given some resources to buy rooms and creatures to fill the tower, and then a bunch of fantasy adventurers (mostly from well known Final Fantasy classes such as Thief, White Mage, etc.) come in and try to reach the top floor. You lose if they get that far, so your goal is to defeat every single one of them by using the right mix of defenses.
While your selection of rooms and creatures is initially limited, you earn more as you go; this helps you keep pace with the increasing variety of enemies. Rooms run the range from basic trapped halls with lots of space to add monsters, to special purpose areas that slow, weaken, or poison adventurers. Monsters in turn have specialties such as melee combat, magic, ranged attacks, healing, and ’generic’ (no weaknesses or strengths), and using them in the right mix to fend off various adventurers is both challenging and interesting. Since you have limited resources, you’ll have to give careful thought to which rooms and creatures to buy, as well as how far to upgrade them; do you really need a top of the line Behemoth when a moderately upgraded Goblin will do the job?
One unusual twist to tower defense mechanics is that Darklord can be paused, letting you build rooms and summon creatures while you think things through. Far from making the game too easy, this is in fact the only way you’re going to be able to keep up; waves of adventurers come almost non-stop, and you’ll often find resources are stretched so thin that you have to pause the game at the exact right moment to summon the reinforcements you need, in the correct place. This is a pretty tough game even when you have the correct strategy, and there are a few stages you’ll surely have to replay a few times. Thankfully they’re not the norm, leaving Darklord as challenging but also satisfying. While each stage lasts only a few minutes, you get dozens of them and should have plenty of play time for your money.
That said, I have only two significant complaints about the game, though neither really detract from the core gameplay. First, much of the plot and story tone are pretty much a direct rip-off of Disgaea with a few nouns changed; Prinny underlings are replaced by Tonberrys (Tonberries?), and the main character acts every bit as comically violent and pushy as the likes of Laharl and Etna. It’s pretty obvious they were trying to capture the same feel and flavor, and the lack of creativity is plain to see.
Second, I’d like the folks at Square-Enix to look at the image on the side. You may or may not recognize her; that’s Darklord Princess Mira, the main character of your game. As you can see, she’s absolutely hideous and I have a request in light of that: In the future, please don’t hire a kindergarten class to collaborate with Baron Ashura on your character designs, which is apparently what you did here. And if you must do that, then at least don’t run the resulting design through an image editing filter set to "vomit rainbows."
Thankfully, My Life as a Darklord succeeds as a game; it plays well, and its various other flaws can easily be forgiven in light of that. Don’t mistake my mocking Square-Enix’s writers and character designers as having any real issue with this game. The important part is that it’s a fun tower defense game and offers plenty of content for your 1000 Wii Points/$10 (US) so it’s worth checking out.
