Is There Mining? - Crystallium Wars TD Flash Ryview

Crystallium Wars TD, by RND Games.

Crystallium Wars TD is a Tower Defense game that, like many of it counterparts, incorporates action elements by letting the player control a unit in the field of battle. It's also categorized as "Mining", although for the life of me I can't figure out why.

It's a pretty neat game on the surface. It has a fun futuristic feeling, and the previously mentioned player controlled unit is a spaceship, so that's nice. The game revolves around your spaceship shooting bad guys and placing building on pre-determined build locations. The buildings include combat and non-combat building, such as unit creators and currency generators.

The turrets don't particularly have much zing to them. Unfortunately, there are different levels, but they all otherwise operate very much along the same lines. You can normal turrets and air turrets. That's pretty much it. And the controls for placing buildings was frustrating. You had to be almost exactly over something to build there. Being offset by a few pixels threw a wrench in any attempt to build, and that definitely produced some expletives.

To be fair, the vast majority of the upgrades affect your ship. And that portion of the game is fairly well done. So as an action game, I feel like it delivers a pretty solid experience. You're flying around, using standard keyboard controls, to kill enemies before they reach your main base and destroy your building. There just happens to be turrets that can help you along the way.

Contrasted by the 3 or so upgrades for the turrets

So, in that sense, the game is pretty much just mislabeled. It is a much better action game than it is a tower defense game. But the game still under-performs in a few areas. The grinding is pretty frustrating. I like the system of diminished replay returns (where your first playthrough of a level yields a high amount of xp, then the subsequent playthroughs yield a much smaller amount), but this took it to a frustrating extreme. I felt as though I had to slog through multiple replays before I even reached the 1/3 point in the game, which doesn't spell out "fancy free" for the rest of the game, either.

It's not a bad game, per se, but like several other flash games I've reviewed lately, I feel like it's full of missed opportunities. Rebalancing the upgrades would help immensely, and maybe showing some of the stats more visibly. I couldn't find as single way to see the differing stats between the different ship weapons. And the turret count for each level, which was limited by turret type, was extremely low, and usually failed to provide any meaningful strategic difference. It would have been much more effective if you kept the required building locations but didn't limit the numbers, or vice versa. Having both requirements just ended up frustrating me and souring the experience.

Seeing this instead of a level for the past 2 days hasn't helped either...

I wouldn't recommend playing this game. If you want a solid action/tower defense hybrid, play Bunny Flags or Kingdom Rush Frontiers. They do a much better job of doing each side of the game justice.

Scorecard:

Category	Score
Time Value	3
Money Value	10
Originality	6
Ryplayability	5
Fulfillment	2
Final Score	5.2

Let me know what you think of Crystallium Wars TD (if you decide to play it)!

Until next time,

Ryan

Images courtesy of RND Games