I've now had access to Utomik's Gaming service for just over two months. Now that I've had said time to take things for a spin with a month of service to go, now was the time to start bringing you some reviews of what I've played. The first of these is Onion Force, a Tower Defense by Queen Bee Games in which the famous trinity of Warrior / Ranger / Wizard take to the field on the command of a fairy in order to protect the last living King.
Onion Force from a concept perspective sounds easy but it's honestly bloody hard and the higher difficulties may take a bit to smooth into. Taking an idea out of Trendy Entertainment's Dungeon Defenders, you have heroes that must repel the enemies alongside the defenses that they can put up. Going off and making things a bit more interesting and unique in this top down adventure is the fact that there's no swinging your weapons at your enemies. You can run into them to take them out or shoot them from afar but once your "stamina" bar is up? There pretty much goes your health instead.
Taking on higher difficulties because of this is why it can be so damned hard. The first time going into each level will only unlock Easy to start off with, but until some equipment falls from the corpses of your enemies or your characters level up making them a little bit tougher, even Easy can be challenging.
Which was fun.
I'll be honest that I haven't played a Tower Defense in a long while that was challenging from the get go and it was fun to tackle it. As for your characters, once their health runs out they fall in battle and you can then switch to one of the other two while your original one heals up. Just watch out as the other heroes and your original spawned one start back off at the beginning of the stage where your King is.
Your King, that you must defend at all costs, dances around yelling at the top of his lungs instead of four walls of stone. No wonder everyone is out to get him! They just want some peace and quiet! Because he's behind these walls however it affords you a bit of time in case you messed up and let a few enemies by either because of poor tower placement or you bit a bit more than you thought that you could chew. Don't take very long however as unlike you the King can't heal and you apparently don't know how to build stone walls. This begs the question… are you just finding these boxes as you move throughout the lands?
Taking a bit of a different route, Towers are upgraded outside of missions by spending stars that are earned from completing each stage. Easy yields one while Normal, if you can do decently, will yield two. Basic level one to level two upgrades cost one star and from two to three cost three. This makes four stars for a fully upgraded and more costly tower as it starts and is only ever placed as it's most up to date form. You never have to work your way up to it per stage which can make things a bit harder than they already are because you can't get away with a slew of cheap towers to start things off. Basically, is you don't feel like moving up to normal right away a full upgrade will take four missions if you don't upgrade at least one or two other types of defenses to make it easy.
Where things can get a bit rough around the edges is that the controls aren't the best especially from a controller’s perspective. You can't move around with the analog stick. You have to use the d-pad that gets a bit awkward because you're never quite moving from left to right / up and down but more in all of the diagonals in between.
Controller aside, if you play the game in a faster pace then everything flows rather well but unlike most games that offer the 2X 4X 8X speeds, slowing things down, or playing on what should be real-time, feels like your computer is going to come to a halt. Slowing down the speed is not smooth and as there's no way that my computer couldn't run this I started to wonder if it was the coding. Unfortunately, for a smooth experience, you'll have to be playing double time or deal with the massive lag in the graphics.
Because of this steep curve in difficulty, Onion Force won't be for everyone but fans of Tower Defense, especially challenging ones, should have a fun time with this. There are more than enough stages and challenges to both stay alive and protect your king to keep you occupied for a while.
Game Information
PC - Utomik Software
Developer(s):
Queen Bee Games
Publisher(s):
Queen Bee Games
Genre(s):
RPG
Tower Defense
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
PC
Mobile
Source:
Utomik Subscription
Article by Pierre-Yves
