Defender by DroidHen is a tower defense game, where you have to protect your tower from waves of attacking monsters, aiming your trusty tower crossbow and throwing spells of three different kinds on your enemies who range from lowly trolls who bash your tower walls with clubs to dragons who breathe lethal fire over your fortifications.
The game is fun, easy to learn and certainly addictive, the graphics are fun and colorful and the creatures, especially the boss creatures are interesting but in the experience of all but a few our testers, you can't advance beyond a certain level, namely circa 100, without spending real money to buy crystals for upgrades and powering spells.
Now, spending money on app is not a bad idea but spending money to advance in levels - this is something we frown on.
Don't get us wrong. The game is certainly fun. Throwing fireballs, freezing monsters solid and fighting hordes of enemies with different configurations of crossbows (selecting a different upgrade to see which works the best) is very fun and certain strategies work best, aiming for increasing shooting frequency, strengthening the ice spell to freeze monsters for a longer time, having a strong fire spell for damage and even a week lightning spell helps to fight monsters while the stronger, main spells recharge.
The main problem, however, is with the boss fights. Once about every few dozens of levels a big boss fight comes up, with trolls, giants and dragons. The only way to beat them is by a massive usage of spells but blue crystals, mana, are used to cast spells and purchase upgrades, such as stronger spells, vital for survival. The end result is you reach the boss fights with too few crystals to win them, ever.
So, in order to win the boss fights you have to shell out a few bucks and buy enough crystals to survive the boss fight and purchase the needed upgrades later. This means once in a number of levels the gamer must buy mana with real world money.
The opinions among our testers were mixed, but most didn't like this arrangement. Testers said it was very frustrating to work your way through the levels and find out you can only advance by paying money ...
To sum things up, our testers liked this game. It's a standard Tower Defense game with nice graphics and interesting spells and effects. The way DroidHen charges money for upgrades, like buy more mana, and makes it necessary for gamers to buy it in order to pass some boss battles made quite a lot of our testers to eventually stop playing and uninstall the game