About Villainous
Villainous game was created by Cellar Door Games and released in June 2011. It is a point and click-based strategy game that actually allows you to be on the other side of a tower defense game for once. In Villainous, instead of building towers to kill evil armies, you control the evil armies instead as you guide them through a maze of towers. The game promises to be very enjoyable thanks to this quirky and clever way of playing around with the tower defense genre. Here are some of the main features of this new game:
Gameplay
A nice storyline always goes well with a quirky game, and Villainous' storyline doesn't disappoint in that respect. You're a wizard who wants to establish his control over the land, and what better way to do that than to use your army to lay siege to and raid all the towns and villages in the land? Sadly though, you don't have an army yet. But raiding villages gets you Infamy, and there's nothing better than Infamy to draw all evil creatures towards you and hence build an army. You start off on a map (which is shaped and designed much like Middle Earth from Lord of the Rings) and raid a couple of villages with nothing but arrow towers before you move on to the big guns like bogs and crater towers and so on.
As mentioned above, you play Villainous game as the person who has to guide his evil armies through a maze with towers alongside instead of building a maze to prevent those same armies from going through. You might think that that makes the game easier, but thankfully it doesn't because there are a number of restrictions placed on the type and quantity of forces that you can send through and the towers always seem to be stronger than anything you might have built in any tower defense game prior to this.
You have six different kinds of forces that you can send out, but only one of them can raid a village: the Goblins. They are also the weakest units that you possess, which means that they need to be protected or you'll never get your raiding done. To do this, you have everything from a Mammoth Turtle, which draws fire away from the other units, to Healers, which heal every member of your army within the radius of its aura and units in between like Elementals, which generate magic as they move and the Cleanse Warlock, which removes bogs from your path. The towers that have been set up are mostly the typical towers that you expect from any tower defense game. The most prominent of these are the arrow, cannon and crater towers which fire arrows, shoot artillery and cause area damage respectively. Bog towers and the Cleanse Warlock go together because while the Bog Tower releases a poisonous gas that slowly saps the health of your army; however, anyone within the radius of the Cleanse Warlock's aura stays perfectly fine. You take control of an area when you gain a bronze medal or, in other words, raid the town at least the minimum times that you needed to. A Goblin reaching one town is considered a raid.
You gain a gold medal and a hell of a lot of Infamy if you manage to reach the Gold medal raid targets, but they are usually really tough.
You also gain Infamy by putting your cursor over one of the gold globs that appear on the ground when any one of your army dies. There's also similarly situated globs of mana which you can use to add to your mana levels. Mana in this game can be used to cast a variety of spells. You start off with the Stun Spell, which stops a tower from using its attack for an entire wave and can then add a couple more spells like the Healing Spell to that to help your armies out. Buying and unlocking all of these upgrades is where Infamy comes in. You use your Infamy to buy spells and upgrades for your units (and unlock some new units too) and each time you buy an upgrade a part of your castle gets upgraded (because after all every dark wizard needs an intimidating monument to suppress his folk and "rule"). The game allows for resource farming, so even if you fail to lay siege to a town the Infamy that you gain from that level will still be there so that you can upgrade further. Plus, each time you use a spell its value rises, so you need to think carefully each time you use a spell.
As was noted above, there are some restrictions that make this game really challenging. Firstly, you can only send a limited number of enemies and each type you select consists of only one of those types. You begin with a unit cap of 1 unit, which means you can only send one of your army. You can use Infamy to raise this limit to 12, but that's as high as it goes. Each time one of your army reaches the village, they get added to the queue as part of a new wave. Going for the next wave is harder though, because towers cause 15% more damage to the units on the second wave. That rises to 30% for the third wave and so on. And no, the units do not get healed when they are released as part of a new wave.
Despite the above restrictions, Villainous game isn't very complicated. It is heavily routed in strategy though, and you will need to work on developing one for each new town as you go through the game. There is yet another way though, although it requires a lot more grinding and is considerably less fun. Basically, just spend a lot of time on the earlier levels farming Infamy and raising the cap on the number of units that you start with in the first wave. Then, use the following order of units: Turtle, Golem, Healer, Goblin, Goblin, Goblin, Goblin, Goblin, Goblin, Healer, Golem, Turtle for every level, and you should be able to go to wave 10 on most of them.
The strategy quotient of this game is absolutely immense (provided you choose not to go with the above strategy). You will have to think deep and hard about every level and how to get through it and maybe even have some failed tries before you do actually get through it. And then you have to work out how to get to the elusive gold medals next. There isn't a lot of variety in terms of the towers you have to face or the choice of units that you have at your disposal, but the number of levels and the sheer involvement of strategy more than make up for any issues due to that. I must confess though, being an evil wizard in a game can give you a thrill that being good can never hope to match, so the game gets full points for taking on that angle as well.
Graphics and Audio
The graphics for Villainous game are quite good as well. The textures seem to be pretty basic, especially for the grass and the paths, but otherwise both your units as well as the towers seem to be really well detailed and distinguished from the background, and while you're thinking hard about the game you won't most likely notice the graphics that much. They could certainly use a bit of streamlining and polish though, but it's not a major issue. The Sauron's Eye logo in the top right of the screen that follows your cursor as you move it across the map is one aspect that I particularly enjoyed. It's a small thing, but it's the little details like that that make this game so pleasing.
The audio goes quite well with the theme of the game and will really get your battle fever on if you play the game for any length of time. That said, I would have preferred something that was slightly more ominous and evil-sounding and less of the chivalrous kind that the game currently has. For a game with such serious attention to detail you would have hoped that the developers got this one spot on, but they seem to be ever so slightly off. Again, it's just a minor issue based on a personal opinion, so it just depends on your taste and whether you like an "Evil Overload" as much as some other people might.
Conclusion
Villainous should probably come with a disclaimer letting people know that they'll need some heavy brain work to get through this game and end up being the ultimate Master of Evil. However, the brain work is definitely strategic in nature and there's no confusion anywhere (mostly because of the excellent tutorial), so as long as you like using your brain a bit you'll love this unique take on tower defense games.