Tower defense games are everywhere. All the major consoles have them and just about every month someone releases one for the iTouch/iPhone. Square Enix did not shy away from this trend when they released the Final Fantasy inspired Crystal Defenders for Xbox Live Arcade. While there is some decent strategy involved here, it fails to offer anything else that is worth your time or money.

Gameplay

Crystal Defenders’ non-existent storyline comes from the Final Fantasy Tactics series of games. Your goal is to strategically place various units on the maps which are then used to stop passing monsters from reaching your stash of crystals. If you manage to still have one crystal left after the 30 waves, you’ve completed the map. Being successful will not be an easy task. There is a lot of strategy required in order to succeed and do not be surprised if you end a map having only completing half of the required waves. Veteran players of tower defense games will feel right at home with the transition in difficulty, but those new to the genre will require some training.

There are three modes in the game, each progressively different. The modes, W1, W2 and W3 change the way in which you play each of the maps given to you. In W1, which acts as an introduction, you have access to a small range of characters and the ability to use Summons during battles. Playing W2, you are given a few more units to purchase and the ability to buy and place status crystals which can give nearby characters better range, strength or speed. Lastly, in W3, you get access to a few more new units and the difficulty is ramped up even further.

When it comes to strategy, Crystal Defenders delivers, but in everything else it fails to live up to its Final Fantasy connection. On top of no story, there are no rewards for your troubles. You are simply attacking waves after wave of monsters with no real justification, reason or satisfaction.

Both enemy and your unit AIs can be confusing at times. Enemies never attack and simply walk the path to the end; which seems weird considering they should be able to do some vicious damage. Your own units sometime do not act very smart when an enemy walks into their attack zone, especially when only one more hit would do enough to kill a passing monster. Lastly, regardless if an enemy is at full health or is on its dying breath, if it manages to reach a crystal, it steals the same amount regardless. This will especially infuriate you when the last few waves of enemies can steal upwards of 5 crystals.

Out of all of its faults, the biggest injustice is the lack of any progression in the game. Most tower defense and strategy games in general tend to open up as you play through the story. Here, everything is available from the start and only the different units in the various W modes make things different. Considering this is Square Enix title, even a generic, evolving story would have made a world of difference.

The graphics fail to give Final Fantasy fans something to cheer about. The game looks incredibly basic when played in High Definition and does not look very different from the iTouch/iPhone version of the game. It also does not help that the battlegrounds also look fairly generic. The worst part is that the game doesn’t utilize the most current televisions aspect ratio properly. All of the maps encompass a small section of the center of the screen with the sides used to show the following waves of enemies.

Sound wise the game does not offer anything new or fresh. This is the same music you’ve heard time and time again. Fans will be happy in the beginning, but the lack of something new will have you craving more the longer you play. It also doesn’t help that the enemy sounds and other effects resonate more in tune to something from an older portable game instead of a current title.

All of the game’s twelve maps are open to you from the start. You can play them in any order, so it doesn’t really matter how you tackle the game. There is absolutely no reward for your actions, so playing a map is just a matter of going through the motions. Because of the lack of story, you will probably play through a few maps, get the idea and move on. A cohesive story or at least a bit more variety would have done wonders to the final product. If you want to show off how well you did, you can save your sessions and upload your score to a leaderboard, but this is nothing more than a really cheap addition.

Regardless of the decent strategic elements that Crystal Defenders offers, the fact that there is no story, any sort of progression or reward makes this a hard game to recommend to anyone. With so many other quality tower defense games available, you would have assumed something set in the Final Fantasy universe would have given gamers a better experience rather than something so completely basic.