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Mubbly Tower (PC)
You love tower defence games? You like building stuff? What about bringing these elements together and adding some management into the mix? This is Mubbly Tower, a cute blend of genres developed by Jesse Venbrux and Ferry Spaans for the PC.
Mubbly Tower is a construction game mixed with tower defence and resources management elements. The goal of the game is to build a structure with blocks (Tetris-style) so that it maintains a specific height at all time. If the player can’t remain at the specified height, a meter starts to go down; when it reaches zero, it’s Game Over. Also, after a certain amount of time, the height requirement increase more and more, requiring the player to keep building. While this sounds easy, a wide variety of enemies will try to make the player’s tower crumble. To fight the opposition, the player can deploy troops on the field. Sadly, like if this wasn’t enough to deal with already, each tower piece and each troop cost money (which can be obtained by killing enemies).
In order to stay alive, the player must manage all of these elements since neglecting only one of them will result in failure. For example, if you just focus on building your tower, the enemies will most likely destroy it and you won’t be able to rebuild it due to the lack of money. Also, focusing of defeating enemies will result in a lack of scoring and probably will make your life harder when you will try to build your tower afterwards. That being said, maintaining a big tower a hard; everything can go from good to bad in an instant. You must always look out for enemies on the ground and from above as well as positioning your troops strategically.
As a reward for getting high scores, alternative modes can be unlocked including Zero Gravity mode, Bouncy mode and Explosive mode. Each of them brings a unique spin on the game’s formula. Sadly, that is about the only thing that might keep you coming back and frankly, these modes are not that interesting to play with (that is, not as interesting as the main game mode).
However, the game features a platformer mini-game called “A Strange Dream”. While this may sound weird, this mini-game is almost more interesting than Mubbly Tower’s main game mode. “A Strange Dream” consists of ten short levels in which you must go from point A to point B. Where it gets interesting is that each level is separated into six panels (just like some kind of comic book). When you enter specific panels, they rotate by 90° (to the left or the right) or by 180°. Because of this, your character ends up walking on walls and ceiling, making the navigation much more complicated which is somewhat a lot of fun.
On the presentation side, Mubbly Tower is not incredibly impressive. The game uses simple childish drawings for the in-game action and most of the available troops look similar from one to another (to the point that it is hard to differentiate them). However, the visuals do a great job for what the game has to offer. Sadly, the story images used before every single session of the game are far from being beautiful (it seems like a young child literally drew those pictures in five minutes). Still, the menus are simple and easy to navigate through. As for the audio, the sounds are really basic (however, it isn’t so much of a big deal). Luckily, the music is quite good.
In short, Mubbly Tower is a nice little title that will keep you entertained for a little bit of time. It blends multiple elements from different genres to offer a good experience. While the platformer mini-game is probably more interesting than the main game, the later still deserves to be played (especially since it’s available for free). Don’t expect much from the game and you probably will end up having some fun out of it.
Mubbly Tower is available on the PC for free at http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=373660.
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Positives:
- Interesting mix of genres
- The management aspect of the game
- The “A Strange Game” mini-game is awesome...
Negatives:
- ... but ends up being more interesting than the real game
- The game gets repetitive after only a few games
Gameplay: 7.5
Visuals: 6.5
Audio: 6.5
Lasting appeal: 5
Innovation: 7.5
Final Score: 7
Game experience at time of redaction: Score of 477 obtained and “A Strange Dream” mini-game cleared
Redacted on: March 12th 2011
Uploaded on: March 13th 2011