After crash-landing on a lush planet infested by aliens, you find yourself having to repair your spaceship and fight off the aliens in order to get back home in this hectic mix of action and tower defence genres. Take control of the cute McDroid, shoot aliens, build up your base and defences, harvest resources and make crazy sci-fi weapons, as swarms of alien enemies come at you, wave after wave, corrupting the ground around and even using your own resources against you...

McDroid is a rather fun budget game that takes the Tower Defence genre and puts a little spit and polish on it. You take control of McDroid, a cute little robot who crash-lands on a lush planet infested with alien scum. In order to repair your ship and to heal the planet, you will have to show the aliens some really close encounters of the lethal kind. You are tasked with building a base and defences, harvesting resources and discovering numerous crazy sci-fi weapons, as swarms of alien enemies try to take the brave ‘bot down. You can leave the dirty work to your automatic turrets, or you can join the fight yourself.

As you progress through the levels you unlock new weapons to help you in your mission.

The characters are oddly cute and you can also pop into your spaceship's lab to take a look at all of the beasties you've so far encountered (as McDroid captures one of each and imprisons it in his own personal zoo). The sense of humour in the game is also another element that is worthy of note.

While I did enjoy this game I could only really play it in short blasts. It's not that it's not fun and engaging, I think the main issue I had was that it could be a little frustrating at times and I didn't really feel like I was progressing very far. And then, to have to redo that level again, but come up with a new plan started to get annoying after a while - especially as a lot of the time it appeared to be luck if you complete the level or not. In addition I was unable to change the safe settings for the screen and as a consequence it was hard to see some of the important information that was in the boxes at the top and bottom of the gaming area.

7

Nick Smithson