Touhou: Gensokyo Defenders - PC Review

Having fought against various foes in order to reign supreme in the lands of Gensokyo before Christmas, Richard took our first look at Gensokyo Defenders on the Switch. With the latest Touhou releasing on the PC for fans of bullet hells, shoot ‘em ups and tower defense, you’ll be following the Ice Fairy Cirno on her adventure of domination and personal growth though the new set of bullet hell battles once known as Danmaku.

Gensokyo Defenders hits a good balance of character interaction and trap placements. The action based tower defense style is a hard one to balance and while some are better than others, this one finds a home somewhere in the middle. Like most tower defense, enemies will be following a predetermined path to your base which contains a limited about of hit points. In order to prevent this from happening, you’ll be using a character to fight them off while also placing defenses in your enemies’ paths to help you out by either slowing them down or thinning them out.

Starting off with Cirno before other characters both new and old, or at least new and old for me, join up, you’ll be learning the ropes of defense which rely more on your character, your skills with the shoot ‘em up style, and your tactical use of magic spells with a limited mana pool. Moving around the map is easy and can be done either quickly to beat the enemy back to your base or more slowly that allows you to perform your range or magical attacks. Something a little interesting is that no two characters are really the same which makes trying them each out quite fun. You’ve got those that are balanced like Cirno, but then you have others that are giant wrecking balls like Utsuho who will destroy the enemy and your own trap placements if you’re not careful. She’s scary...

Placing your own traps is easy as long as you’re paying attention to what you’re doing. Some traps like spikes or bushes are designed to be put in an enemy’s way so that they walk over it and get hurt or slowed. Others, like the towers, are designed to be placed off to the side of the path in order to hit anything that is walking by. As you complete stages you’ll gain access both to new trap types and the possibility to level them up.

With a total of four towers that can be equipped at a time, and these are not locked by characters, it was nice that you could remove any upgrades and apply them to another. The same system applies to character boosts which can increase their hit points, mana points or speed amongst other abilities. The catch to all of the above? The amount of points that you can invest depends on how well you completed a stage.

Completing a stage is as easy as defeating the boss on the very last wave. Completing a stage well however depends on how many hit points your base has left at the end. One enemy getting through is one point gone. You dying on the field of battle is about five points gone. So in reality, and part of the better design, is that you can afford to let one or two through, but more than that, and you’re getting a two out of three star performance. Each star you get equals one upgrade point so you’ll really want to aim for those three stars if you want to keep up with the scaling difficulty.

If there were any issues with Gensokyo Defenders it would be that the PC port is not quite the smoothest that it could have been. Even while using a controller the mouse cursor is constantly in view on the last menu item that was selected making it a good idea to keep the mouse close by. Added to that, there’s a bit of screen tearing that can happen and with no Vsync option, the visuals can give a bit of a headache until they finally decide to smooth in. The only other issue that I had, and this was more of a me issue, is that the overall wave process felt slow and there was no way to speed it. This could get pretty long sometimes especially when you had almost an entire wave of slower mobs.

Overall, Touhou: Gensokyo Defenders may not be the best Action Tower Defense out there, but it’s a good one. With many different characters and loads of stages, it’s provides a fun time and the craziness that Touhou is renowned for.

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Game Information

Platform:
PC
Developer(s):
Neetpia
Publisher(s):
Unties
Genre(s):
Action
Tower Defense
Mode(s):
Single Player
Multiplayer
Other Platform(s):
Nintendo Switch

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Pierre-Yves

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Touhou: Gensokyo Defenders - Switch Review

Gensokyo Defenders is a neat take on the classic tower defense style, with a greater focus on your player character than on the traps you set. True to the Touhou style, there are lots of bullets and swathes of enemies to evade and fight off.

In the land of Gensokyo, the main method of dispute resolution or time killing is Danmaku, or what basically amounts to a bullet hell battle. Recently however, Yukari has come up with a new game to play, and taught it to the rather dense and easily influenced faries. So welcome the new method of battle/entertainment, defense battles!

The defense battles are, at their base, pretty standard fare: you have multiple waves of enemies attacking a “base point”, and you need to lay traps down to prevent the enemies from reaching your base. Each enemy that reaches your base will take a point of durability off of it, and if the durability runs out, you lose. Placing traps requires money that’s earned in-stage by defeating enemies, and you can lay or remove traps at any time. There’s also a short break between waves where you can set up/demolish traps before choosing to start the next wave.

Where Gensokyo Defenders gets a little more innovative is in the stage layouts and use of the player character. Stage layouts can be simple pathways, but they can also feature environmental hazards such as large thorns or rivers. Any enemy that isn’t a flying type can be thrown into the hazards in order to kill them. This also works on your player character, however. You don’t just place traps, your character can actually shoot and use special moves in order to attack the invading enemies. In fact, I generally found that the majority of the enemies I dispatched were from me actually shooting them, rather than the traps I had laid out. Occasionally there will be power ups that will increase you normal attacks and special moves that you can pick up. Additionally, after a certain point, you unlock the ability to upgrade your character or traps using the stars you earn in stages, which are awarded based on how much health your base has at the end of the mission.

While the graphics are pretty decent and the character art is pretty good, I did happen to notice that it seems that characters generally tend to be rather…bustier, than how they’re normally portrayed, which is maybe a little weird, but considering the massive amount of fan based interpretations of characters, not particularly unusual. The music consists of some rather nice remixes of Touhou tunes, some of my favourites in fact, and I didn’t notice any sort of lag that you normally see in these style games, especially when there are a boat load of enemies on screen and everyone is shooting, although it does become rather difficult to see where all the bullets are, and who is shooting what.

Ultimately, Gensokyo Defenders feels like something that would be more at home as a tablet or phone game, just with higher specs. If you plan on using your Switch more as a mobile style device, rather than a console, Gensokyo Defenders feels a lot more “right”. That being said, there isn’t any issue with it as a short and sweet time waster for a console. You can pick up a mission or two, and complete them in 10-15 minutes without too much hassle. Gensokyo Defenders would definitely appeal to those looking to make their Switch more of a mobile handheld, or those who enjoy a good tower defense style game.

Game Information

Platform:
Nintendo Switch
Developer(s):
Neetpia
Publisher(s):
Unties
Genre(s):
Action
Tower Defense
Mode(s):
Single Player
Multiplayer
Other Platform(s):
N/A

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Richard

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