Creature defense is a tower defense game that incorporates several collectible card game (CCG) elements. If you’re a long-time reader of GDN you know that I believe there are far too many WWII games and far too many Tower Defense clones even though I really liked the original Tower Defense. So let’s find out if this game can break the streak and mount an offense against my prejudices in regards to the tower defense genre.

Creature Defense, from Hudson Soft, takes a fairly standard approach to the genre. A wave of monsters follows a pre-designated path. Your task is to destroy those enemies before they get to your fort and do damage. To do that you are given a deck of five cards that allow you to summon multiple types of creatures (replacing standard towers). Some are ground-based attacks, some can attack flying creatures, they are all either phyiscal (melee) or magical (ranged) attacks. Most have special abilities that they impart when you level them. Those special abilities affect units around them or the enemies passing by (another CCG element).  The cards span five elements - fire, water, forest, light and dark and you can unlock three cards from Sony’s Eye of Judgment. Each element is more effective against certain other elements so there’s an added level of strategy to the game.

However, Creature Defense really boils down to an almost standard tower defense title. The small deck of cards you are alloted means you can only ever place five types of creatures and the effects of their special abilities are hard to see. In fact I have no clue how effective some of these are as they seem to make little difference most of the time. Additionally, collectible card games often have some sort of game changing cards or modifier. This game takes that away and simply gives each card the aforementioned special ability.

As in many collectible card games, the enemies you take on are the same creatures you yourself can summon. As you progress through the game you unlock new cards, which you already saw as enemies trying to defeat you. It’s an element of CCGs which could have easily been avoided here as it makes the game less interesting. So if you’re curious what cards you can unlock, simply look at the monsters coming at you and those will be mostly what you can expect. Additionally, each element has basically the same list of creatures taking even more potential variation out of the game.

In regards to graphics, all of the units and environments have a sort of classic anime look to them and the environments are of course static images. They’re nothing special and won’t have you Oohing and Aahing. Neither will the sound which consists of loads of crashing sounds that are all muffled and incoherent. Every attack sounds like a mini-explosion and there’ very little variation in the sounds. The soundtrack is far from suitable if you ask me as it is a techno/electro set of tunes that just don’t fit with the high fantasy motif of the game.

Overall, there is very little to seperate this game from its tower defense brothers. The few CCG element they did implement seem only to limit the game or be almost completely ineffective. It’s a great idea that seemed to have failed somewhat in execution. The poor sound doesn’t help the title in the least and even with multiple modes of play, the game still doesn’t seem like it is all it could have been.