I've had an adoration for tower defence games ever since they started cropping up in Flash form all over time-waster websites; the browser-based varieties comprised a significant chunk of my focus whenever I had time to kill, and it's a genre I can never really get enough of. As the genre's popularity has exploded, developers have found more and more interesting ways to implement the idea while still adhering to the original concept.
drone is a short freebie game by David Wilson. Mixing ideas, drone is a hybrid top-down shooter combined with a tower defence game in a way that works really well. Your character is a little sprite, the titular "drone," who has to kill enemies to collect money– this money is used to finance the weapons and ammo you need to go on and kill bigger and badder enemies.
However, there's more than one way to play the game. Your drone can be equipped with weapons like axes and lasers, and you can simply run around the map killing enemies in waves, upgrading yourself as you go. If you prefer, as I did, you can also eschew being a pint-sized battle bot and funnel your currency into building defensive towers and factories that do the hard work for you. Towers can fire machine guns or lasers, or create a variety of robots that seek out and kill enemies– you can also create a factory that builds a bot that runs around the map picking up the loose currency left on the game field. The game can be beaten without building any structures at all, or without using any weapons at all, though obviously you can also pick a combination of the two.
In all there are five levels which should equate to at least three hours of game play. It's a quick game that's more of a technical demo than a full release, but given the polish and the creativity with the game mechanics I definitely hope it gets fleshed out into a larger release. Check out the official gameplay video below, and the "part one" release is available for download on David Wilson's site above.
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