Tense, Minimalist Tower Defense

Tower defense games -- in which you place defensive towers with different characteristics to shoot at and stop a flow of invading critters (or "creeps") -- are one of the first unique and original game styles to spring from independent games.

As such, they're exactly the sort of game Manifesto was created to promote -- an innovative game style not seen in the conventional game industry.

An increasing number are appearing, precisely because this type of game strikes a chord, and is compelling to many people (me among them). Attack of the Creeps is a nicely polished game of the type, with tense, edge-of-the-seat gameplay, and levels that are by no means easy to beat, as the game goes on.

First Responder Sim

In Emergency 3, you control a city's first responders--EMTs, fire and rescue services, police, and so on--responding to emergencies. In twenty missions, you have to deal with a wide variety of them, from raging fires to explosions, derailed trains carrying dangerous chemicals, etc. There's also a 'sandbox' mode with randomly-generated emergencies, so once you've completed the missions, you can continue to play indefinitely, if you like. It's a real-time strategy game, in a sense, but your objective is saving lives, rather than conquering enemies.

RTS Meets Abstract Strategy

The fantasy behind Firewall is that you are controlling a force of 'defensive' robots fighting an invasion of viruses. In practice, the "viruses" are opposing teams of robots--some that build posts that "control sections of memory" (squares on a grid), and some that are offensive or defensive units. In other words, the fantasy is largely irrelevant, and in essence, this is a Chess-like game of abstract strategy--if Chess were real-time, of course..

GI Combat is a real-time strategy game, engulfing the player in the dynamic conflicts of the Second World War. The fully three-dimensional environment provides unsurpassed detail for terrain, armor penetration, vehicle movement, morale, and combat resolution. Immerse yourself in the agonizing struggle to hold back enemy offensives, lead an assault to capture key objectives, and charge into the fray with gritty, determined grunts. You have the chance to live in that moment, and rewrite history!

RTS With the Focus on Strategy

Over the years, conventional RTS games have gotten prettier and prettier, until today you can have hundreds of screaming Romans running across the screen in a scene that looks like something out of Cecil B. DeMille.

Kind of amazing, really--expect that, with rare exceptions, not much has changed in terms of the actual gameplay. It's still build, turtle, rush.

What if, instead of concentrating on improving the graphics, you took the "S" in "RTS" seriously, stripped away the resource extraction and tech tree, and looked for ways to create diverse strategic challenges with each level and thoughtful use of combined arms?

Polished Real-Time Fantasy Tactics

Chronic Logic, developers of Bridge Construction Set and Gish return with a very different game: a tense, nicely polished game of tactical fantasy combat.

Before a 'round' starts, you purchase units--initially, you can choose from swordsmen and archers, but many other units get unlocked in later rounds. You place them on the map, and enemy units emerge (in a number of "waves" of attack). Combat is real-time, but pausable--and you will, in fact, be pausing frequently to order your units to move, or to use special powers (such as "taunt" for swordsmen, useful in preventing enemies from moving past to attack your more vulnerable archers, or "heal" for clerics).

Ants Long For Combat, Too

Magnant is a charming little indie real-time strategy game in which you control a colony of intelligent, technologically sophisticated ants waging battle against other ant colonies and the evil bees and beetles. It has all the usual RTS tropes--resource extraction, building construction, and real-time combat--as well as a pretty cool version of online play.

It has one innovative and unique aspect, too; virtual "cards" let you build special units or buildings. They're earned through play, and as with a trading card game (like Magic: The Gathering), you never know what cards your opponents will deploy when you play online--which creates a greater degree of variety. Your carefully-planned strategy may be upended or need to adapt quickly when an opponent deploys a special unit you hadn't anticipated.

Pretty neat.

Defense is boring, right? Attacking is action, advance, and victory; defense is static. You sit there and hope for the best. No war was more boring than World War One--unmoving defensive trench lines for four long years. So a priori, you might think a game named "Master of Defense" would be, ah, less than scintillating.

Actually, it's quite cool.

You purchase defensive towers and place them on the map. Initially, you have a choice among three types: ones that attack walking critters, ones that attack flying critters, and ones that attack both but do far less damage. Each tower has arange of attack, which you can see as a circle about it by selecting it.

Old Favorite Updated--And now $9.95

Mudcraft was the Central Commitee's choice on the day we launched--and has now been updated to version 1.3, and the price cut in half. We thought we'd feature it again.

A Non-Violent RTS?!

Dune II, WarCraft, Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, and Empire Earth--real-time strategy games have always been about warfare and conquest, right? How could you possibly do a peaceful RTS?

That's the challenge a team at Michigan State University set themselves... and quickly found that their inspiration outgrew their dreams, attracting contributors beyond the university, becoming an Independent Games Festival finalist in 2006--and expanding from a freeware student project with a handful of levels into today's commercial game with 45.

Driven to please a dark lord, the evil minions of Necromania scramble to collect the keys necessary to free their dark master from his supernatural bonds and win his favor forever. Each despicable servant possesses inherent magical powers to aid them on their wicked quest to unleash a horrifying evil into the world and doom mankind.