Concept! Dictators sending armies to attack you. Great concept. However, the game only has one dictator “boss” – Castro. The others are presidents and movie heroes. Even if you go all lefty political and call Bush a dictator (eye roll), you can’t account for Schwarzenegger in any of his roles or call the Kill Bill character a dictator. Am I nit-picking? Not really. Also, there is no correlation between the dictators, the levels and which towers are active. Might as well have been random. Poor implementation of what could have been a good idea is a theme with this review. Everything missed the boat. What else?

Gameplay! I played the blackberry version, but if they failed to consider how the game should work on this device, why should you assume they figured things out for yours? You shouldn’t. In my case, they use the trackball for rolling / selection and for clicking. That’s not a bad control if you’re editing text, but in a game with time pressure you need to think about how this works. The game authors did not. To build a unit you have to roll to the location, click, roll to the unit, and click. This can be done but the blackberry isn’t built to do this at breakneck speed. Roller ball is tiny and so selection of cells is very “twitchy”. So what happens? Placement of units in a different location than intended or placement of the wrong units! How could they fix this? Use spacebar or some other key to do the entry and the roller ball to do the selection. Pressing on a roller ball to select ensures it will occasionally “twitch” to the wrong selection as you click. Everyone knows this, why not the folks at Digital Chocolate? But that’s not the only problem. What else?

Balance in leveling!

Regardless of level of gameplay each phase falls into one of two categories – it’s either mindlessly easy (type 1) or you’re counting on luck (type 2). For every “hard” / luck round, you will have five mindlessly easy rounds. What do I mean by mindlessly easy? I played one round blindfolded and won. What do I mean by luck? I played one round three times the exact same way and was victorious once. Playing it differently, and you lose. Hope you like memorization games, because that’s the only skill you need for this.

Game Depth
Selling units has no point. Their value on resale is so very low (less than 10% of purchase cost), I’m not sure why they bothered giving you credit at all. You only sell units because the controller was twitchy and you placed the wrong one.

The “hero” has no real value in the games. They tried to make this a significant point of the game with special animations and such, but you can just as easily ignore it. If you can’t win the round without him, he’s not going to be much help – even fully upgraded. There were a few times where I was teetering on the brink and he made the difference, but I mean a few times… like three. Otherwise, the hero is useless.

It doesn’t matter which boss you are playing, gameplay is unaffected. This is just a trick to make you feel like there are 40 levels or whatever, but there are really only three levels: Waves where they come slow, waves where they come fast, and waves where you can’t place banks. That’s it. You can call the “boss” level a fourth wave, but again, if you were successful at building your army up, you can pretty much leave the pieces on the board, let the boss stomp around, and you’ll win just by watching.

As you successfully complete levels you get to upgrade your units. …and who cares? This part of gameplay could have been a lot better. Instead of five upgrades, make it three and make each upgrade *count*. Instead, each unit has many upgrades and you’ll be hard-pressed to tell the difference between some of them. They just don’t get much better between upgrades. Some units actually seem to get worse against their mis-matched counterparts. For example, there’s a bad dude with a sledgehammer that will take out your rifleman after a number of whacks because that’s the wrong defense. Got it. But if you have a few rifleman in a line or a flame-thrower, it takes long enough that the sledge guy is taken down, too. But now why does an upgraded rifleman die *faster* and allow mister sledge to take out multiple units?

Music?

Pong had better music. Turn it on only if you need to announce to the people around you that you’re playing a game. Beyond that it has no value. Imagine listening to 30 seconds of a fight game title screen on auto-replay. There’s your music… enjoy!

Replay Value?

None. No points to be had, no new things to try out, and in many cases no alternative ways to clear the level. Clearing a level is like clipping your nails. Not fun not satisfying and once it’s done it’s done. You can get OCD over it, but once you clear a level there’s no reason to go back unless your life is so dull you can’t think of a better way to spend your time. Dictator Defense on the blackberry was $7, and that was 700 pennies too much.

Like I said, I LOVE tower defense games, but this was a steaming turd on my phone. I actually felt like the authors hate me, personally. Well now it’s mutual. Not only will I be purging the game from memory, I’m never going to buy another Digital Chocolate game again… ever.