What I Played Today: June 18

Protector 4

So, I have this weird relationship with Kongregate. There are a lot of styles of flash games that I don’t personally care for, most specifically tower defense games, because once you boiled them down, none of them are actually very fun. It’s all either constant frustration or a complete steamroll, and frankly watching a whole bunch of things that you have no real control over kill things that don’t matter to you gets pretty boring for the amount of time you need to invest in it (most levels take over half an hour, for example).

But, whenever Kongregate decides that a given game needs a badge, I need to play it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a game I’m going to hate (OH, I also hate those damn “shoot an arrow at an advancing army games. They suck hard bones), I just need to try it to try to get the medium trophy. Screw the hard trophy, that’s ridiculous if the game sucks, but I can handle the game for long enough to get the medium trophy.

And so I found myself playing Protector 4, which is the fourth in the line of the most-beloved tower defense game that I really dislike and respect. Why do I hate this game? Because the “towers” need to be leveled, which is goddamn TERRIBLE. There should not be two different resources to determine how advanced I can make my tower. That puts me on point from level 1, and do things that are counter-intuitive, like put your towers at the end to start with, meaning you waste more time and take more risk because the game demands it. Bleh. Also, there are so few rules to tell you what to do.

But, this game takes that to the next level, with a storyline and forcing you to micro-manage everything! The general gameplay is the same, with the five different attack types which have different abilities, only now you don’t have access to all the types on the map, instead you have to choose your heroes, each of which have access to only one attack type, so I guess you have to hope for the best, and there are a lot of items, and leveling, and oh god it’s not fun. There’s just so much going on, and none of it is worth doing. But I played it for about an hour! Because it’s on Kongregate! And they have me by the balls!