IDUN – Frontline Survival Review

thesixthaxis.com:

While the cosy genre for some might mean a spot of farming or a touch of interior design, it’s tower defence that remains my calm, happy place. I’m not sure what that says about me, but it’s fair to say that IDUN – Frontline Survival puts you in that zen zone of constant watchfulness, laying down destructive towers while the hideous alien hordes attempt to overrun your defences. Ahhh, so cosy.

You play Security Officer Ham, who’s literally having a nap on the job when you’re introduced to him. This is the only rest he’s getting though, with a grotesquely rude awakening when vermin start to attack your mining post. You have to rely on your trusty flamethrower turret and Ham’s shotgun to make it out alive. There’s a cool sci-fi story running through IDUN’s tower-centric action, presented with great-looking character art to back it up.

The narrative drive helps to get you dug in with IDUN’s different mechanics, from controlling multiple hero characters, alongside moving and shifting your towers to deal with threats in the moment. As with the best tower defence games, IDUN forces you to face huge swarms of incoming enemies and hold them off, and it’s a lot of fun doing so.

The thing is, this isn’t so much a tower defence game as it is an RTS defence game. It merrily skewers the two genres together, and if you’re a fan of either it’s a winning combination that takes very little time to get you hooked. You move your towers and heroes as you need them, and it maintains a frantic pace that isn’t often found in the defence genre.

The only downside to moving your towers around is that you potentially lose some of the strategy and decision-making that you do when placing things permanently. In return though, I really like the addition of hero characters that you can use to plug gaps and turn the tide in your favour, and the increased pace lends IDUN – Frontline Survival its own feel.

There’s resource collection to think of too, and it’s often like spinning a very angry plate,