Obsessing over TD: Nicemetal

Here’s a little Flash tower-defense game called Nicemetal by Babara.

It’s not something that screams for mainstream: the name is weird (and we don’t care as long as it follows the “all your base” pattern 🙂 ), 8-bit graphics (and even of the very dull and dusty kind), 8-bit music, the menus and cutscenes are in Japanese and the menu flow is kind of weird and highly against any good UI experience, including the fact that it doesn’t save the mission progress and you have to finish the game in one session.

But, as I said, it’s okay because the gameplay is brilliant in its simplicity. You don’t build anything, you don’t upgrade anything, all the turrets are already built. You don’t have to worry about waves and enemies: there is only one enemy. All you have to do is send 5 pixels small stickmen to man the turrets or wherever on the field to fire pixelated bullets, again and again, because they’re kind of amnesiac and return to the pool after a short while. All in all, the gameplay faintly reminds me of Z by Bitmap Brothers.

The game it would have been a masterpiece if the squashed stickmen would have died in a pool of blood, like you can do in another game by these guys 🙂