Ok, so I totally made up "tower defence-like" but the truth is that this little flash game isn't totally like other TD games. Sure, you have advancing enemies that need to be repelled and you have a base that needs to be defended (shaped like a tower no less!) but there are a couple of quirks that make Mars Commando stand out.
I'll come to the gameplay in just a sec but first the style. It's a solid chiptune and fat pixel affair but without going overboard. Almost a NES on sound and SNES on GFX, however the tune while I was playing never changed though. It was suitably 'spacey' for the setting but was starting to get a bit annoying by the end of my session (however it might change at the end of the first Level or "Day" alas I only played up to 8/10 waves before I accidentally refreshed my browser so I don't know at the moment. Fortunately you can adjust the music volume independently of the SFX vol so Yay!
The GFX are nice and tidy, the charging aliens look the part without being messy and the other items like status icons and barricades are some great examples of pixel art sprites.
So to the gameplay. As mentioned it's not quite your standard TD fare. The basics are there, a tower to defend, and waves of enemies to slaughter, but instead of micromanaging your defence in realtime, upgrading towers as you can, you set the squad up before the wave with what you can afford and then hope it works! it's not totally a passive affair after that though, you still have control of a roaming droid and can pick off targets that slip through your defence net and get to an area not otherwise in range of your fixed munitions. Be warned though... The first few levels are pretty easy once you get to grips with the system but it's not long before the difficulty ramps up pretty solidly and you have to really think about your positioning to get the best out of your troops (which are themselves are a depleting resource.)
So all in, it's an enjoyable afternoon waster which I could easily have lost the rest of the afternoon to had I not not lost my browser session...
Check out Mars Commando on itch.io
-Alistair
@ABrugsch
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