I’ve always seen Tower Defense as a genre with a head start on the competition. The wave-based flow, the upgrades, the chaotic visuals, they all add up to a genre built distinctly on fun and satisfying mechanics. The genres concepts are inherently good, and it seems to me that you have to go out of your way to mess that up. You only had one job, McDroid…
In McDroid, you take control of the eponymous hero and his talkative spaceship on a quest to save a dying planet from parasitic creatures. That quest takes the form of wave-based tower defense where you can control McDroid, deck him out with weapons, and join in on the combat yourself. You play the roles of commander and participant, handling the upgrading and placement of towers as well as helping to manage the threats yourself.
On that basic level McDroid is a success. The interface is a bit clunky, but once you get the hang of it the controls are intuitive and offer a good amount of options. As an active participant you’re free to make a lot of decisions about how you tackle each wave. I often found myself filling out a minimum of towers while decking out McDroid himself in the best gear, kiting enemies away from objectives and wearing them down with special items.
All the weaponry, from lasers to missile launchers, to tesla coils and helper droids, can be slotted onto pegs in the environment or placed on McDroid’s head. They’re introduced slowly over the course of the game, as you’d expect with this genre, but that’s where things first start to go wrong.
Nearly every stage past the first one is designed with new mechanics and gadgets in mind. The tools you have aren’t good enough on their own, requiring you to quickly get a feel for the new toys and utilize them in the way they’re intended. That’s fine and all, but that strict design resulted in a consistent trial and error method that took a lot of fun out of progressing through McDroid.
I consistently fumbled through my first attempt through a stage, and often my second and third attempts as well. I felt like my tools weren’t good enough, no matter how intelligently I played, until I discovered the one particular thing that was expected of me. For a game that builds so much freedom into its mechanics, the actual level designs are extremely limiting. Whenever I discovered that one thing they wanted me to do, the challenge became immediately trivial.
Far stranger is the decision to integrate a sort of premium currency into the game in the form of diamonds. Don’t worry, you don’t have to buy the diamonds with real money, but the system does carry with it a similar balance to a free-to-play game.
I got most of my diamonds by destroying the corpses of larger enemies, and they carried over between levels. They’re used in an upgrade shop for unlocking better equipment, but I was only able to afford the upgrades if I returned to earlier levels and started grinding for them. In the earlier stages, these diamonds can be used to create explosive barrels that trivialize most encounters. Towards the end these premium items are seemingly required to succeed, leaving me with no choice but to pick one stage and mine it for diamonds over and over.
The result is that McDroid suffers from the worst problems of free-to-play games without actually being free. It forces you into unfair corners and asks you to step outside of the core gameplay to win. Grinding for diamonds and then using them to buy overpowered weaponry breaks all sense of balance and strategy. I always had it in the back of my mind that if I just played the seventh level a half dozen more times I could cheese my way through whatever challenge I was stuck on.
I’m not sure what the motivation was to introduce a premium currency into McDroid or limit players so heavily in how they can succeed. Whatever the reasons, the result is a game that offered a lot of gameplay options, but immediately killed me if I didn’t do the one thing the designer wanted. With some retooling, McDroid could be a legitimately great game, but as it stands, it just feels like wasted potential.
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