iBomber Defense iPhone App Review – Raising the Bar on TD Games

Land, Air, and Sea Tower Defense — Whoa!

As of March 10th, 2011 it has been absolutely confirmed by a very unreliable source that every single iPhone owner has played one of the many tower defense games available from the app store. Whether that’s true or not, it’s close to true. Tower defense (TD) have seen a lot of success in the app store, and there have been a lot of clever variations of the classic gameplay over the last few years.

If you are a fan of TD games but you haven’t had a chance to play iBomber Defense ($2.99/Lite), be sure you don’t miss this one. Sure, you’ll have all of the standard towers you’ve come to expect (machine guns, cannons, slowing towers, anti-air, and towers that boost other nearby towers), but don’t think you can just build a bunch of towers and then forget about them! In iBomber Defense the enemy fires back at you so you’ll need to keep a close eye on your towers and repair them periodically.

With this new game mechanic comes some interesting new upgrades to choose from: repair (which increases your tower’s armor strength and lowers repair costs) and buy (which increases your starting cash and how much you get back when you sell towers). After each level you get another point to spend into either of those skills or into strengthening one of your tower types.

Although most TD games have the enemies traveling along one path, a few of them have 2 or 3 path options — iBomber Defense has tons of pathing options. I don’t know the total number of possible paths the enemy can take on some of the more complex maps, but it is easily over a dozen. Defending against them all is definitely the biggest challenge, and definitely a large part of what makes this game so fun. Just when you think you’ve covered all of the paths well, the aircraft come in and follow their own route.

While tower defense has been done before, it has never quite been done like this. Sometimes deviating from a proven formula to try something new doesn’t always work out, but in this case it definitely does. The gameplay of iBomber is still familiar and as addicting as any other good tower defense game, but with enough new items here to prevent you from feeling like you just purchased a game you already own. It’s a refreshing approach to the tower defense game.

iBomber Defense – Chillingo Ltd