Written by dgoldring on Thursday, January 29, 2009

Review: 7 Cities (Or, When Pirates attack)

I won’t say I have always liked Tower Defense games. The truth is that I have never been a fan of World of Warcraft (which gave birth to the genre) and only discovered these games only when I reviewed Azgard Defence for Windows Mobile (which remains among the best of the genre as far as I am concerned). That latest entry is 7 Cities for iPhone and iPod Touch.

As the title suggests, this game consists of seven cities, which you must protect. Each city is built on a river, which provides the only access to the city and its riches. Waves of pirates (and some other creatures associated with the pirates) try to approach and overtake the cities. Because this is a tower defense game, your job is to build towers to stop the pirates. Let the fun begin!

Overview: So, let’s take a look. The main playing mode is Campaign Map. In this mode, you must successfully defend each of the seven cities from a designated number of waves river based attacks (In Survival Mode, you will continue until you run out of lives regardless of how many waves of enemies that takes.) The rivers start off pretty easily with the Ruby Terra, a lazy flowing river with lots of bends and curves. Pretty easy to defend against the mere 15 waves of enemies coming at you. Over the course of the game, however, the rivers will become increasingly more difficult to defend, until you reach the final location on the map, Onyx Monolith. I don’t want to give away any surprises, but we’ll just say get ready for multi-angled attack on your lone city.

Enemies: While we are talking about the enemies which will be attacking your city, let’s go ahead and take a closer look at what will be coming at you. There are five different kinds of enemies in this game:

Light armored scout ships
Medium armored corvettes and carp
Heavy armored battleships and giant turtles
Regenerative sea serpents
Immune water bugs

Each enemy type possesses different attributes, meaning some towers will work better against different types of enemies. So, don’t be fooled into thinking that a light armored scout ship is going to be easier to destroy than a heavy armored battleship. That kind of t hinking is a mistake which will result in your early exit from this game. Like most tower defense games, different towers are more effective on different kinds of enemies.

Additionally, every five rounds, you will face a boss enemy. When you face a boss, it will appear alone, with no other enemies on the screen. These bosses can be difficult to kill, but the rewards will be well worth the effort. The other special item to watch out for is pirate treasure, which appears as a bonus round periodically throughout the game (that’s them on the left.) These treasures are heavily shielded, so you are going to need all of your resources to destroy it, but like the bosses, the rewards are well worth the effort.

Towers: We keep talking about how it will be up to you to destroy the enemies in this game. And this is where the towers come into play. There are five different towers in this game:

Arrow
Cannon
Lightning
Tornado
Obelisk

Each of the towers, like the enemies, features a variety of attributes. For example, the arrow tower fires small arrows at an extremely rapid pace. It is perfect for fighting light armored enemies. The cannon tower, on the other hand, fires a large, destructive ball, but does so very slowly. It is most effective against heavy armored enemies.

This combination of attributes in your enemies and towers makes this an extremely challenging game. It means you must carefully plan your towers in order to ensure that your city is defended against all classes of enemies, especially in later rounds.

Gold and Coins: When you start a new game, you will be provided a limited amount of gold (displayed in the upper left corner) with which to build towers (the amount of gold you receive will be based upon the difficulty level you select). Each tower you build costs between $25 and $100 gold coins (except the obelisk, which costs $300. To earn more gold all you have to do is destroy your enemies. I do have to say, however, that I felt like the amount of gold you received from your enemies made it difficult to afford some of the more expensive towers. It felt a bit out of proportion to me, but not by a lot. I would have liked more parity between the amount of gold you earn and the cost of the towers. This is something which should be tweaked, either by lowering the cost of the towers or increasing the amount of gold you earn by destroying enemies.

One of the things I liked about 7Cities, though, was that you do not have to use your limited gold resources to upgrade your towers. In most games, you need to use the same resources to upgrade as well as to purchase new towers.

In 7 Cities, in addition to earning gold coins, you may also earn blue gems. Blue gems can be used to upgrade the abilities of any tower. Additionally, each time you destroy an enemy, that tower will progress toward the next level (making it stronger). Once you reach level 5, you will earn a yellow gem for that tower. Yellow gems can be used to add a skill (which can be unlocked in the skill unlocker menu).

Skill Unlocker: Each time you save a city, the people of the city will reward you with two red gems. These coins may be used to unlock new towers and skill upgrades from the skill unlocker menu. Each of the five towers has two potential upgrades, except the obelisk which has four.

I did find it a bit odd, however, that there are only 12 potential upgrades, but seven levels gives you the capability of earning up to 14 red gems. I would have liked to have seen more strategy involved here by adding many more upgrades. this would require you to spend significantly more time strategizing about the best skill arrangement for a particular level.

Conclusion: I have played quite a few tower defense games on both Windows Mobile and the iPod Touch. And I have to say this is one of my favorites. I think the approach of protecting cities located on different rivers is creative, and really makes the game stand out from the host of other games in this genre. The game is extremely challenging, which means you will not get bored, but the three different levels of difficulty and seven maps ensure that you will also not get too frustrated and give up on it.

When I started playing this game, I was also concerned about its potential for overcomplication. Not only did it feature five different towers, each with multiple upgrades, a variety of enemies divided into five classes, and seven different maps; but it also has blue gems, yellow gems, red gems, and gold coins. Really this could have been overwhelming. The developers did a fantastic job, however, of keeping each element separate. This meant there was no chance of confusing the yellow gems with the blue gems or red gems. What could have been extremely complex and confusing turned out to be straightforward and enjoyable. If you enjoy tower defense games, you are going to want to give 7 Cities a try. It offers fantastic graphics and an extremely creative look at a really worked over genre.

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