Game Title: Hexdefense Free (Android Market link)

Phone Model (reviewed on): Samsung Nexus S

Maybe I’m wrong here but I think you should allow your players to beat unpaid versions of games, I mean, what’s the point in proving to the user that the game is so hard that they wouldn’t even stand a chance in the paid version? Where’s the incentive to buy it? I may be jumping the gun here and perhaps the paid version offers more variety, but my failure in the free version tells me I’m not cut out for it.

To be fair, I was hooked on this game from the beginning. The graphics are very easy on the eye, the music, while a little repetitive is good (besides you tend to tune out after a while anyway) and the explosions and other effects are really nice so kudos to the developer there. The addiction seems to be in trying out the different types of towers and playing with layouts.

However, it’s not balanced correctly – every time I got as far as wave 16 (of 20) I was annihilated. I went from comfortably killing all invaders in round 15, albeit getting rather close to my home hexagon, to every invader bar the front two reaching it, meaning in wave 17 I didn’t stand a chance. I also like to think I had a pretty impressive array and layout of defense towers! It would also be nice to have an undo feature because the tower placement can be a little unforgiving sometimes.

I’ve not played a lot of tower defense games, but given the audience of the Android Marketplace, I fear too many will find this too difficult for the same reasons I have.