This Party Style Tower Defense Game Taught Me Not to Be a Man
If I were to describe my overall impression of Steam’s indie game scene in recent years, it would be something along the lines of “creativity is promising, but the quality often varies”. Among the best indie games, players can encounter rare surprises from the big companies, and the strengths and weaknesses are always clear, making people have mixed feelings.
The recently released Beep Bang Bang Battle is a prime example of this.
It’s a tower defense game that combines elements of action. The design of the game, both inside and out, suggests that it’s actually moving in the direction of a party game. From the first moment you open the game, all sorts of cute elements come to you, with the Moe Wizards posing for rebellion and the four geeks going up to the sky and the sea.
The home base before the official departure is an airboat with many small objects to interact with, including a cute little black cat.
Tower defense games are often associated with strategic thinking, but they’re still a long way from being suitable for young and old, and Beep Bang Bang Battle has cut back on that quite a bit. For example, there is no external growth system at all, and the design of the defense towers is quite simple: pick a good location to build a tower, upgrade it, and then there is nothing else to think about, and there is almost zero coordination between the defense towers. In other words, it’s like a party game with a “turnkey” approach.
Become a tower defense expert in two steps
At this point, Beep Bang Battle is one step away from being a party game: it allows players to fully participate in the game and create non-stop interaction. This leads to the biggest feature of the game, where the player isn’t “sitting on top of a cloud looking out of the corner of your eye,” but rather maneuvering a character who is hands-on with everything.
You can walk to the side of the road and lay down defense towers, or you can swing a war hammer and personally kill the enemy into the abyss. The process is very comedic and often results in some hilarious scenes.
The ragdoll physics system” common in party games.
Characters have different skills, for example, yellow Thor can increase the power of the hammer, red Annika can increase the efficiency of the defense tower upgrade, etc. But the duration of the skill is short, and the cooldown is very low. However, the short duration and long cooldown times of the skills do not differentiate the characters very much, meaning that players can pick and choose according to their preferences. It can be seen that the production group intends to minimize the amount of thinking the player has to do and lower the threshold as much as possible.
If this wasn’t a linear flow game, it would be no different than a casual game like Sugar Man.
But once you actually get your hands on the game, you realize that it’s not so “casual”. The gentle appearance creates the illusion that you can play the game any way you want. But when faced with a difficult situation, the right answer is almost always the only one. You’ll need to ditch some of your useless playstyles, focus on stacking the most useful towers, and be ready to deal with them at all times, which is a huge contrast to the party game’s lighthearted and witty impression.
To summarize it simply: it’s too hard. The cheapest machine gun tower, for example, takes five hits to kill the lowest-level enemy at level one, and with its slow rate of fire, it’s far from being able to stand up to the opposing team’s manpower, often requiring the player to get on the field and block them themselves.
However, as the level advances, the player’s actions begin to be limited, pushing the heavy enemies that can not be pushed, enemies that will paralyze the player …… targeted enemies to limit the performance of the character, so that players are again forced to turn to ascending the tower. Helplessly, only in the higher level of defense tower can have a more considerable output. Knocking a tower from level 3 to level 4 on your own without the help of other abilities will take you about 20 seconds of in-place penalties, which doubles to 40 seconds if it’s level 4 to level 5.
It doesn’t sound like much, plus the fact that not only do the upgrades require no additional resources, but they don’t affect output, as if it’s an all-or-nothing deal. But
Upgrading means temporarily losing all control, during which you can do nothing else but watch the progress bar slowly grow.
The difficulty level is too high, putting the player in a dilemma. Choosing to upgrade requires you to hammer in place, but hordes of enemies don’t give a damn and slip right under your nose; choosing to charge ahead and block enemies is always a drop in the bucket. The player’s hammer does very little damage, and the head-bobbing physics system is usually fun to look at, but when it comes time to get down to business, it’s a crying liability, and there’s always the dilemma of “getting in the way”.
What are you blocking?
Choosing to block also means that your defense towers may not be able to keep up with the level of the next enemy, and your access to resources may come to a standstill, leading to a vicious cycle of not only being overwhelmed, but also not accomplishing anything. All the official screenshots you can see on the Steam homepage are of a four-player game, which makes you wonder if they’ve neglected to test the single-player mode.
It’s hard to get four people together.
The answer to the question of whether or not one person can play the game is yes, but it’s definitely not easy.
If you want to get further than three stars, you basically need to memorize the board, grasp when to upgrade what towers, and when to go down to block. There’s no slacking off at almost every moment, and the margin for error is pretty low. The way to get a relatively normal gaming experience is simple and straightforward: bring in your friends. The more players you have, the more total initial resources you have, and the faster you can upgrade.
Accordingly, enemy configurations don’t change, but the speed of each incoming wave increases dramatically. From what my friend and I experienced throughout the day without interruption, even with two people working together, most of the levels in the game were only barely passable, and reaching perfection was even more elusive, relying more on luck. The moment the game ends, your relationship with your friend will surely be sublimated.
To put it another way, and to use a popular online hashtag, i-human gamers are in trouble.
Action elements make taking care of two easy to make operational errors and multiply the difficulty under single player
In terms of map design, Beep Bang Bang Battle really deserves a separate mention: each level of the map has new interactive elements that make you curious to see what new tricks the next level will have to offer. For example, you can maneuver a crane to throw tricky enemies into pits.
In another jungle level, there’s a constant underground ambush of man-eating plants. Players can lure the plant into a group of enemies, duck out of the way when it breaks out of the ground, and let the plant take out the enemy for you, and the list goes on and on.
In the game’s mine level, for example, special crystal turrets can be built, which need to be loaded with ore from the map to activate.
“Work, work!”
You can also stuff minerals into a grinder to make delicate diamonds, giving the turret more power and more ammo.
In actual experience, even with a clear division of labor, my friend and I were busy as if we were cooking at Cooked Up Intensity. The Crystal Turret can only deal with one specific enemy and requires very frequent reloading, much to the point of being a racket. What’s frustrating is that the special enemies are ignored by the other defense towers, leaving the player to hoof it both ways between hordes of special enemies and general enemies.
Overall, Beep Bang Bang Battle is well done, except that it is again conservative in terms of crispness, leaving the game’s positioning a bit vague.
It’s hard to imagine how a single player would cope with the electric ball barrage that paralyzes the player later in the game
The good thing is that after browsing through the Steam Store reviews, I realized that the production team is aware of the aforementioned issues and is working on updating the difficulty options and such. If the update is in place and you can get a few friends together, then this is worth a try.
