Defendin’ de Penguin

Posted 4 years ago By - Zach R.

There’s a simple rule when you’re in the Arctic: Never get between a penguin and his fish. Crave Entertainment are attempting to drill that point home with their new real-time strategy game for the younger crowd, Defendin’ De Penguin. Considered an entry point to the RTS genre for gamers under 12, DFD mixes cute visuals and simple controls with some challenging strategical gameplay.


Gameplay

The main mode in DFD is the story mode, in which we find our hero, Little Blue fending off a fish-stealing crab with a well-aimed snowball. Professor Profi, the towns inventor witnesses the event and decides to develop a powerful tower that hurls snowballs at incoming adversaries. As the story progresses, Profi will introduce new stronger towers, as well as power-ups that will enhance the fire power of each tower in order to deal with new threats. As Little Blue, it’s up to you to strategically place each tower to ensure that you complete the level with minimal losses to your stock-pile of fish.

Dealing with these enemies means that you’re going to require just the right amount of force. Snowballs will for instance take out crabs, but tougher enemies, such as bears and walruses are going to require a little something extra. As new adversaries appear, Profi will make new towers to deal with such threats. Icicle, ice cube and other such towers become available to you the further you progress and the more money you earn, meaning that dealing with these enemies is only a matter of finding out what works best against which foe. One particularly cool aspect of the game is that Blue has the ability to boost a towers effectiveness by inhabiting it. The one drawback? There’s only one of Blue, so deciding which tower he inhabits is nearly as important as the location of the towers themselves.

Blue starts off with a small amount of money which he’ll use to purchase the towers that Professor Profi has available. Killing enemies will earn more money, which in turn he can use to buy more towers, which he will most certainly need. This also means that managing your funds is just as important as the defensive aspect of your game. This is really one weak point in the game however, because killing enemies is the only way in which you can earn extra cash. This means that if you’ve got a hole in your defense as a result of poor turret placement, you’re going to find yourself flat broke and void of fish in a hurry. One way to counter this is by sending Blue to fishing holes throughout the maps to help keep the amount of fish at a satisfactory level. You’ll need to do this in the earlier levels, however, as later levels become all about defense and leave little time for Blue to kick back and do a little fishing.


The controls are fairly simple. You can use either the Wii-mote and nunchuk combination or just the Wii-mote itself. Using the Wii-mote itself feels a bit awkward, to be honest, as you have to use the D-pad to look around the maps. Being that Blue requires you to press the A button to move him to areas, it can be a bit more hassle than just using the nunchuk’s analog stick to perform the same function.

The rest of the controls for the Wii version are pretty straight forward. Pressing the A button to access the build menu will bring up the menu of available towers. From there, you simply select the towers you want, (or can afford), and place them by pointing the Wii-mote to the appropriate area on-screen. Fishing is handled the same way, which I think is a bit of a missed opportunity for DFD, as there’s no use of the motion controls at all. I realize there are several games out there that have fishing minigames in them already, but adding a little something extra really couldn’t have hurt, and may have made the fishing segments a bit more engaging. Still, the controls work as they should and it’s easy enough for the younger set to grasp with minimal assistance.

Graphics and Sound

I’ll be honest here, there’s just not much to look at during this game. The animations are cute, but there’s not a whole lot to the character models, which look as though they belong in an SNES game. The environments are barren and bland, but that may actually be intentional as the game is set in the Arctic. Still it feels like absolutely no effort went into making this games visuals, and it just seems like a wasted opportunity.

The sound is just as bad. No voice-acting and repetitive, but still catchy music make this almost not even worth mentioning. My advice, keep a stereo nearby with your kids favorite music as there’s no need to listen to this games audio for more than a few minutes.


Value

With three difficulty modes (Easy, Challenge, and Extreme) 10 stages per map, and a Quickplay mode outside the main story, there’s quite a bit here for kids to sink their teeth into. Experimenting with the different tower types and finding out just which strategy works best will certainly keep your young ones busy for quite some time. The only thing that bothered me about the game in general is that there’s no co-op mode to allow parents to assist younger gamers with some of the more difficult maps. Still, there’s a fair amount of content and on the higher difficulties enough challenge to make it worth a look if you’re looking for a simple and cute RTS to pass the time.

Conclusion

While I can’t recommend DFD to adults who’ve experienced more advanced RTS’s out there, if you’ve got a young gamer in your life and you’re looking to introduce them to the world outside of platformers and kart racers, Defendin’ De Penguin is a good way to go. It never tries to be something that it’s not...it’s unapologetically an RTS for kids, and quite a good one at that.

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