Review: Excubitor – your average tower defense game

After playing Excubitor I’ve attempted to write this review numerous times. And if I’m going to be totally honest, it’s taken several full attempts to come up with something to say, either positive or negative. But the issue is that Excubitor is neither a wholly positive nor a wholly negative experience. Excubitor is simply an average game. It is the most average game that I have played in a long time.

I could go on to tell you about the game play, but I would simply be describing any other Tower Defense game that you can purchase. But there are a few things that Excubitor does a bit differently. Instead of having to create turrets between rounds you are forced to do so on the fly while the enemies are still on their way. This gives you the opportunity to see what is or isn’t working and alter your strategy as you go.

Your ship upgrades are your typical fair. You have the basic rapid fire weapon, your powerful precision weapon in a missile launcher, an area of effect explosive weapon, and a few different elemental style weapons including one that does fire damage, one that freezes and another that passes electricity between enemies. Each of these weapons is fun in their own way and you can equip two on your ship.

The ship upgrades are also as you would expect. You can increase your shields, your weapon damage, your armor and your engines. Each of these has the effects that you’d imagine that they have. Shields increases your shield health while armor increases your ship health. Additionally ever four points that you place in your stats gets you an additional perk.

The game consists of four levels each with four stages. In each stage you fight off waves of enemies while placing your turrets. At some point however you will run out of energy to build turrets and have to reach into your cash to build power generators to allow you to build more turrets or to upgrade the ones you already have. Boss battles are much the same. The first boss battle sees the ship in space fighting off a much larger and more powerful ship along with waves of enemies. You are able to cripple the main ship’s weapons and the main destructive cannon to help give you an edge.

The replay ability in this game is basically nil. There’s no way to play on line or with friends. It’s a simple standalone story and there’s not really anything wrong with that per say, but for a game like this it’s definitely more of a detriment that there isn’t a fun way to play more of it or share the experience.

The Graphics are nice. And if you have ever played StarCraft you are sure to be hit with some kind of nostalgic feelings if you played as Terran. The ship that you pilot and the moveable main structure that you have to protect all evoke all of those old feelings via their design and the design of the environments. The enemy designs vary but only a bit, yet every level brings new types of enemies to the table even if the designs don’t change much. You begin with enemies that fire bullets then move on to enemies that launch rockets or enemies that hold you in place and ships that heal squads of enemies.

Overall the game is very average. It doesn’t really try much of anything that is exciting or risky or new. But it does an ok job with everything that it has at it’s disposal. But given the price tag of $19.99 USD is it worth it? I would have to say no. Waiting for the game to go on some kind of sale through steam is a much better idea. More than likely it will be played once and then left to rot in your steam library forever, under piles and piles of other games. As such my advice is to wait for it to go on sale for anywhere between 30 to 50% off before you even consider the purchase.