For my personal taste, it was a good & neat little game, one of my favorites, at least in the TD & Sci-Fi genres, which I generally don't really like too much.
The Towers are put on orbits you can spin on a given trajectory, making it an interesting and sometimes tactical mixture of static and mobile defenses.
It can be pretty hard though, even on the lower of the 4 difficulties and story mode, but challenges which add additional negative handicaps to the already challenging story missions, especially, as well as Arcade Mode after LVL 50, when mother ships are just flying all over the place, not respecting your little 'Invincible' (Which brings me to the next point: the encyclopedia is a nice little bonus). I might not even call it hard, though it wasn't easy, as trial & error principle may be more accurate, since if you figure out which satellites to use in which locations at what times it becomes easy enough, it just may take you several attempts and fails to find each mission's sweet spot.
Additional Cons:
- not all of the satellite types are really useful
- the Arcade mode is not customizable (different options would have been nice, etc.)
- there is no 'movie gallery' to watch all the video clips, + therefor an Encyclopedia though
The FMV parody sequences of 50s cheaply made Sci-Fi Movies are nice, but short and rather few, as a matter of fact after you win the last mission, which isn't even as hard as some of the ones before it, IMO, the game just ends, would have been really nice to get a final one minute FMV end sequence of brave space captain Adam rescuing Ms. Universe Arielle from the stopped Gorg menace.
The Soundtrack, background music are nice and suit the sci-fi setting well,
the Audio Effects (attacking, UFOs being destroyed, not having enough money to build etc.) are pretty good as well, though could have used even more variations as is already given.
The (only) British Voice Dub catches the atmosphere well (Subtitles I think are also only in English, just Menu, Mission select etc. is available in other languages I think).
Together with a little Starship Troopers Anti-Specieist Propaganda and some Marsian Alien Mars Attacks! flair (I just watched the movie for the multiplth time after many years and it goes well with the game, obviously ^^).
Also props to having a Demo so we can try out the game for free before spending money on it, which is how I came to buy it, since I liked the Demo gameplay and that you even added achievements to the Demo (Also props for making watch the credits an achievement), which not many Devs take the time to do.
Would have been nice to play some other games by Futuremark, something tells me I would have enjoyed them as well, unfortunately though only 3 were ever made and the other 2 are now unplayable, this being the last obtainable and playable one, before they shuttered or sold their gaming branch and also got acquired by UL to focus solely on benchmarking software. Would also have enjoyed some Steam Trading Cards and Points Shop items for this title.
Something tells me the leaderboard with points was either bugged at some point or cheated, or arcade points counted for others, but they didn't for me towards my total score.
The only similar games I played when it comes to the mix of genres, not the setting, is the early Plants vs. Zombies games, which are also a mix of Tower Defense and light-hearted comedy and I enjoyed as well. Though I found another title on steam called Fortified which is also a 3rd person shooter & TD mix and a parody of Alien Sci-Fi, which I hope to try out one of these days and will hopefully like as much as this one.
I'd even buy this title and recommend it to others for full price instead of waiting until it goes on sale, which I don't often do.
Anyways, good luck stopping the Gorg and not getting deceived by the Brainriders or de-mooned by the sunbots on your way to dangerous Planet X.
