Defendin’ De Penguin – WII – Review

Defendin’ De Penguin is an
introductory real-time strategy (RTS) game designed specifically to give
children a taste of the genre. Crave Entertainment serves up a well-thought-out
Tower Defense style RTS that is definitely geared in both context and design
towards younger gamers.

The story line follows Little Blue,
an energetic and feisty little penguin, who is bound and determined to stop the
animals in his winter kingdom from stealing his village’s fish. He stumbled
across the sure fire way one day when he strikes a curious crab with a snowball
and forced that crab to drop the fish. Profi Penguin, an inventor and defensive
schemer, witnessed Little Blue’s snowball toss and began inventing towers to
harness Little Blue’s techniques in fending off enemies. Little Blue is enlisted
to help test out Profi’s new inventions and new towers are developed throughout
the course of the first map as new enemies are introduced.

The overall gameplay is really very
simple; a line of different animals (wolves, foxes, crabs, walruses, etc.)
stream along an orderly path towards the village that houses all the fish for a
community of penguins. It is your job to set up towers that will thwart and slow
the enemies as they approach. There are different types of towers that use
specific ammo and deliver different damage types to the enemies. Snowball Towers
deal general damage, Icicle Towers are piercing and Ice Cube Towers are blunt
damage. All the different towers can be upgraded over time to increase damage
and area of attack. Some enemies come along that are more vulnerable towards
either blunt or piercing damage and the strategy is therein tied to the layout
and setup of these varying types of towers. Little Blue is used to go around the
map and retrieve powerups, as well as fish the ice holes to bolster the
village’s reserves of fish. Little Blue can also be put into the different
towers to “assist” by increasing that tower’s statistics a little.

The primary game mode is a Story
Mode which takes the player from village to village defending the penguins from
fish-hungry animals. Each village has its own Map, and each map has 10
increasingly difficult stages associated with it. New towers are brought in by
the professor as you move through the levels, and Profi Penguin will add
upgrades to the towers along the way. Each tower is built using silver coins
that are gained by both defeating animals, and picking up the random coins
dropped by defeated enemies. Fishing must occur during each level because if the
villages supplies of fish are depleted, the level is over and you start again.

There are two frustrating parts
about the way this game unfolds. First, the distribution and acquisition of
coins, which are the only way to build new towers, is different than in other
RTS games. In other titles, there is generally a constant way to earn currency
that can be used towards building infrastructure. In Defendin’ De Penguin, since
the only way to earn coins is by killing enemies, if you have built a faulty
layout of towers and enemies are able to get through without dying, you don’t
get more coins to build the necessary towers to succeed and therefore are forced
to start the level over once the animals have stolen all your fish. The other
frustrating part is tied into this circle of failure because coins are carried
from stage to stage within the specific map you are in. So, if you had a faulty
strategy three stages ago, and you have misallocated your towers earlier in the
map, your only option is to start the whole map over again and work out what was
wrong. This can be angering if you are at map 3-8 and you are forced to go back
to 3-1 to right your wrong.

The control scheme on the Wii is
very simple. Moving the map is controlled with either the D-Pad on the Wii-mote,
or the stick on the nunchuk. Pointing with the Wii-mote will control where
Little Blue moves to or where you place your towers. The build menu is brought
up with the A button and selection of towers is pretty intuitive from there. I
would have thought that being on the Wii platform, this game would have had
something interesting with the motion-sensitive controllers (like fishing
motions while fishing); however, there really was nothing exciting about control
scheme and although the manual says that you need the nunchuk, the D-Pad on the
Wii-mote does the same thing.

Defendin’ De Penguin is a good game
that is accessible to the younger gamer who might not be familiar with the
often-difficult RTS genre of gameplay. Crave has done a great job bringing this
type of game to a new generation by creating a cute and cuddly story with a
happy ending that is playable by anyone. The replayability for adults however,
might not be that great. Where this game might continue to entertain children
who are unfamiliar with the genre, adults will desire more than the fluffy
gameplay offered here.

Gameplay: 7.0
For an RTS, the gameplay is straight forward. Giving the child gamer a game
where strategy and forethought are involved is great. There are some flaws with
mistake-forgiveness, however, younger gamers might not be so critical.

Graphics: 6.5
The graphics aren’t anything special. The animations on the animals are cute
but can be robotic in nature. The level designs are varied enough to keep your
attention but are all basically the same.

Sound: 5.8
While I applaud the bluegrass music stylings of the between-level dialogue
pieces, the in-level music is repetitive and sometimes grating like a 45-second
loop of circus music repeated for 10 minutes or so throughout the levels…

Difficulty: Medium
There is enough variance in the level design to keep you on your toes. With
three difficulties to choose from, there are options for harder gameplay
available. The Easy setting takes about 4 hours of gameplay to finish.

Concept: 7.2
The idea of an RTS for kids is a great one. I think that by easing up on some of
the harder elements of more advanced titles in this genre, Crave created a fun
and engaging story for kids. The only thing that could have been fleshed out
more would have been making it more of a “Wii title” with use of the nunchuk and
Wii-mote more than just point and click … 

Overall: 6.9
This game accomplishes the goal of bridging the gap between the challenging
real-time strategy genre and the child gamer and does a great job appealing to
that generation. However, for even the casual adult gamer, the repetitive nature
of the levels and the minor frustrations brought on by the simplicity of design
might lead to just a good rental experience.