The visual charm lasts longer than the audio charm, which turns sour as more and more squished enemies produce increasingly repetitive squishing noises. The artistic style has a do-it-yourself feel and uses everyday objects, such as bottle caps, string, and construction paper, to create the gameworld. However, if you play for even a moderate amount of time, the shouts will fade to whimpers and the smiles will turn to winces of repetitive stress fatigue. As your individual efforts congeal into a unified struggle, the frantic fun will yield vociferous strategizing and smiles all around. The challenge of the early levels is to be the highest scorer and thus gain control of castle upgrades, whereas the challenge of the later levels is pure survival. It is best played cooperatively with one or more friends, and up to four people can play simultaneously.

Each level brings more and more numerous foes that keep coming until your walls collapse under their onslaught.Īs a single-player game, Defend Your Castle wears thin quickly. Upgrades let you convert enemies to your side, where they can man the archery tower, repair your walls, or roll explosive wheels of cap-gun ammunition out onto the battlefield. You gain points for each eliminated foe, which you can then spend on castle repairs or upgrades between levels. Then, with a twitch of the wrist, you smash your foe against the ground and vanquish it, or just fling it into the sky and let gravity do the rest. To defend your castle, you point your bread-clip reticle at a button-headed stick figure and press a button to grab. As test cases go, this one is a moderate success.īottle caps, popsicle sticks and buttons! Oh my!ĭefend Your Castle milks its simple gameplay with castle upgrades and tougher foes, but it ultimately comes down to how fast you can point and flick with the Wii Remote. And Defend Your Castle is just that: a small dose of short-lived fun for the low price of 500 Wii points ($5). The sound quickly becomes grating, and the constant wrist-flicking is tiresome, but the wacky presentation and frenetic multiplayer action can provide a good bit of fun in small doses. The gameplay consists almost entirely of grabbing stick figures and flinging them to their doom to stop their mad rush toward your castle.

It was originally released (and is still available) as a free, online flash game, and the WiiWare version is largely the same game despite a total aesthetic overhaul. Released in the first batch of new downloadable games available through WiiWare, Defend Your Castle is an interesting test case for Nintendo's new venture.

Defend your castle with guns