Horn Swaggle Islands is a Tower Defence game developed by Pencel Games featuring 12 levels of Singleplayer action, score keeping, multiple difficulties, and a variety of Towers and Enemies. The game will set you back 400msp (£3.40).
Horn Swaggle Islands opens up to a nice pirate vibe, with hand drawn style menu graphics and a cheerful pirate background tune. Straight away the game's presentation stands out - all of the menus are simple yet carry across the same styling throughout the entire experience. Navigation of the ingame menus is simple - using the right analog stick to move around the Tower Menu and the left analog stick to move around the playing field itself. It doesn't take long before you're placing towers and upgrading them without any thought.
The game throws 44 waves of enemies at you, spawning from the same location - all of which are trying to reach various points on the island. By placing down various towers you must stop them from reaching said location, however to make this task slightly easier the game gives you 15 lives which deplete by 1 each time an enemy reaches the end. The key to Horn Swaggle Islands quickly becomes apparent - upgrading. The game allows you to upgrade each tower up to 5 times to improve its fire power, speed and range. You will soon realise that it's actually better to have less upgraded towers than more basic ones. An interesting mechanic is that due to multiple end points the game lets you block off all but 1 point - a tactic I regularly used. This means you can funnel the enemies down one set path which they are forced to cross.
Despite these tactics the game is significantly unbalanced. The normal difficulty is simply far too difficult from as early as the first level, even for a Tower Defence Veteran! Yet switching down to the easiest difficulty can often result in things being too easy. This is something which really needs to be looked into and balanced out. If the enemies had slightly less hit points this wouldn't be an issue.
Graphically the game looks relatively pretty. The bright island colours and clean sprites all suit perfectly and work well. However much of the game is extremely small, which is not a major issue for High Definition TV owners, nonetheless those only on Standard Definition will have a difficult time reading some of the text and menus. The sound in the game is all very simple - as stated above an appropriate pirate tune plays on the main menu however when you actually get into the game there is no background music whatsoever - this is slightly dissapointing yet is a better decision than repeating the same 1 or 2 tunes everytime you play. The cannons firing and enemies dieing making a satisfying and lighthearted pop noise which add to the enjoyment, along with some uncanny 'Worms' style speech coming from the pirates. Finally the calm sounds of the island in the background make for a relatively relaxing experience at times.
Overall Horn Swaggle Islands is an enjoyable Tower Defence game. There are some flaws such as the unbalanced difficulty and it would have been nice to see more variety in the enemies and towers, as the same sets of enemies starts to get dull - possibly flying enemies or ones with a resistance towards a specific tower. Also the lack of multiplayer definitely hurts the game, especially with cooperative tower defence titles being a welcome trend at the moment. The game will last a good few hours due to the length of each level, allowing you to get your 400 points worth. Theres definitely room for improvement in Horn Swaggle Islands however the solid mechanics, pretty yet simple graphics and overall charm carry the game through making it a solid recommendation for Tower Defence fans.
Horn Swaggle Islands gets an Indie 3.8/5
