Swamp Defense

Tower defence is one of the genres where gamers have a tendency to think that once they've played one title they've played them all.

And with some justification. Whether you're defending the saviours of Middle-Earth or shooting down aliens storming from the skies, the fundamentals remain the same: knowing what towers to place, where, and when to upgrade them.

Swamp Defense fits this mould perfectly. The aim of the game, level after level, is to halt the progress of enemies travelling along a set path. As the game's title suggests, the path is in a swamp.

The swamp setting has a role to play beyond mere decoration. As the bug-eyed beasties make their way out of the water and trundle on by, you can only place your defenders on solid land.

The levels themselves are grid-based, with the dust track your foes snake along consisting of right-angled turns aplenty.

This means it's possible to set your guards – hicks with a variety of weapons including guns, pots and pans, and splatter weapons – up around said corners, firing on each of the swamp things as they track past.

Each guard naturally has his own role: standard shooters shoot, while the pan-wielding mothers wield, yes, pans.

It's utilising a mixture of these two – and, upgrading them when credit allows – that tends to bring most joy.

The aforementioned splatter-gun is less useful. Its role is to slow down enemies by shielding their vision, but given how slowly the enemies already move it has a fairly negligible effect.

Where Swamp Defense does well is in the range of foes on offer. Differing in both size and capability, the waves breed a torrent of action, with some enemy falling apart within just a few shots while others hold on until the very last minute.

As a result, guard placement becomes more important than ever. With just six types of guard on offer and just a few upgrades to be unlocked for each, it's crucial that their range spans the entire map, ensuring the enemy is fired upon from all sides rather than just in one area.

There's no escaping the fact that Swamp Defense is a basic offering. It comes across almost as a no-frills introduction to tower defence, to play before moving on to more sophisticated examples.

However, even though the gameplay amount to the same thing on each stage – placing down gunners before expanding and upgrading when the credit is available – Swamp Defense manages never to get stale or dull.

One wave finishes just as the next kicks off, so there's never an ideal place to hop off, keeping you glued to your handset.

Swamp Defense's simplicity is its signature, demonstrating that the most addictive casual games are often the most economical.