Traps range from large boots that give your enemies a swift kick to faulty air conditioning ducts that slow their progress to treadmills that heroes just can’t resist running on.
There is a nice variety in trap type, and the traps themselves tend to have an interesting design that leads itself to the comic and lighthearted tone the game seeks to achieve. There are also minions, which have no placement restrictions and will wander around on a floor and attack (or heal) whoever and whatever they see.
Traps come in either the automatic or manual variety, and while automatic traps will do their work on their own, you’ll have to keep an eye on the manual ones as they’ll need to be tapped to get them to work.
As you defeat enemies, occasionally they drop money which you can use to buy the aforementioned upgrades, new traps, or extra slots so you can carry more traps into battle. Most spaces allow you to place a trap on the floor, the wall, and the ceiling with certain traps specifically designed for each. There are a wide variety of traps to chose from, all off which can be upgraded to improve damage or attack speed or add some other special features. This isn’t to say that challenge is completely absent from the title because later levels can absolutely run you over if you don’t plan well, but most of the game feels a bit like a class in Tower Defense 101. Because of this, some of the aspects of strategy that are typically present in a tower defense game are largely absent here and as long as you aren’t dumb enough to place a trap somewhere the heroes aren’t walking to pretty much every location has the same efficacy. You can place traps on any acceptable space, but there is essentially only one path for the heroes to take to get to the princess. The game is best described as a tower defense game, albeit a simplified and scaled down version of what you are probably used to.The game plays out on a flat map, with the heroes moving from floor to floor going up ladders and through doorways. Through forty five levels of increasing difficulty you must protect your castle from knights, Rambo impersonators, and even superheroes as they storm your castle, destroy your traps, and completely ruin your upholstery. As such, you must defend your castle by placing a variety of traps and other impediments to slow the heroes progress and prevent them from recapturing the princess you’ve rightfully stolen. Unfortunately, heros have no respect for property rights and keep on storming your castle to try and rescue her. Lord Evilstein coming off of his recent successful kidnapping of a princess. It might not really have much in terms of innovation and there are certainly more challenging games on the market, but this is a perfect little distillation of everything you like about tower defense games in the simplest, purest terms. With all that being said, Castle Doombad is a new tower defense game that really deserves some attention if you have some interest in the genre. It really is close to becoming a saturated genre, and with so little innovation coming along it is hard to recommend any new tower defense games as you’ve probably played them already. In the time it takes Google to finish putting together the search results for “tower defense games,” six more are made and none of them are any good. They seem to be an easy game for most novice studios to churn out, and there aren’t too many tweaks you need to make to what is already a wildly successful formula. At this point, it really seems like there are more tower defense games than there are potential customers to buy them.