In case you are wondering, Stenches is Trenches with zombies instead of Germans. Having not played Trenches a ton, my time with Stenches was much like hanging out with a long lost girlfriend that moved away far too soon: it’s fun for a time, but then you realize why you weren’t so upset when she originally left.

Stenches lives in the side scrolling castle defense/attack genre that is populated by such titles as Trenches and Epic War 3. The basic concept is to build a bunch of units to fortify/advance your lines while fending off the waves of zombies that are approaching from the right. As you kill zombies, you get gold that you can spend on new troops or ballistic weapons that can strike the zombies from long range. The goal, much like a WW1 battle, is to advance your army to nearby trenches that not only provide shelter, but can be upgraded to become a troop spawn point.

Sales of the game, and its mass popularity, surely come from the polished exterior and likable characters. There are no NPC’s to speak of, but the troop units all have a likability that isn’t matched in the genre. The battlefield, zombies, heck, even the battle sounds in the game are all extremely well made… often sucking you back in after you are determined to stop playing.

Once you get past the polish though, the game quickly shows off its true colors. There are a few issues that I have with the basic game play, and most of the issues come down to frustrating troop movement. First off, the movement in Stenches is all done by line drawing, just draw a little line to tell a unit where you want it to go. This is a great implementation of the touch screen, but when you have 5 units standing in the same spot, what do you do? This problem comes to light primarily when you are advancing your lines to a new trench. To add difficulty, Stenches puts a troop limit in the trenches, and the only way to raise this limit is to upgrade the trench with an engineer. Singling out the engineer for movement is a pain in the rear, and protecting him is even worse. It would make sense to protect your hard-at-work engineer with a few machine gun units, but in the heat of battle when you are moving the units to the trenches their horrible AI will overshoot the trench and blow their cover. Needless to say, there badly needs to be an “advance to next bunker button,” in addition to the regular advance gesture.

My other squabbles come down to the maddening lack of hand to hand combat strength and the unfortunate low max troop count, but the movement issues are by far the most frustrating. Do these issues mean that Stenches is a bad game? No, but it’s hard not to think that the game could be much much better with a few of the kinks worked out. As is, it is a worthy buy if you love the genre or are a fan of Trenches… just be ready for some frustration.

[ Stenches Review is a post from 148Apps ]

Medieval, created by Briskmobile, is a castle defense game in which you must force the opposition to say “uncle!” by either blowing their castle to kingdom come, completely slaughtering their oncoming troops or by stealing their flag.

You control a huge bow on top of your castle and you must shoot arrows at the advancing forces. The enemy will come at you with everything they have: knights, soldiers, balloons, catapults and etc. You have to defend against them with your bow and army… Read More

I’m as delighted as I am pained to review Keep Defenders from Itty-Bitty Games LLC and hopefully that statement makes sense by the end of this review.  What we have here is a game billing itself as a fast-paced realtime combat game.  I’ll buy that; quite accurate and while some reviewers are lumping it into the castle defense genre it far more resembles a traditional (medieval) RTS sans base building.  You control a small army consisting of 3 unit types (soldier, knight, archer) and attempt to fend off wave after wave of enemy units (which are unfortunately just darker-colored versions of your own guys).

First the good: the graphics and sound…excellent in both categories which definitely takes the game up several notches in production value.

So the bad stuff mixed in with some sincere suggestions:

-10 lvls seems ok for this kind of game but they’re quite small and the random nature of enemy spawns means you’re always just hanging around the keep and never able to explore the map
-controls are a stinky mess, clearly this game would be great with a mouse but it’s horrible on a touchscreen (is this a port?)
-could use a button (or a double touch) to automatically select all nearby units without having to draw a rectangle and also a way to select just a certain unit type
-could use a way to cycle through units as it can be frustratingly difficult to activate the unit you want in a battle mosh while he just dies as you tap away
-could use formations, at least a couple (think Myth The Fallen Lords if any of you know your gaming history)
-archers are a joke, almost impossible to be effective with as often you tell them to attack and they rush up and melee instead!
-can almost never get a unit to disengage which kills the MAIN strategy of the game which UNFORTUNATELY consists of way WAY too  much micromanagement
-maybe some challenge levels could be introduced where you get a set number of units to achieve a goal and can’t buy more
-plodding pace, levels take forever to complete as each wave can consist of several separate attacks and units have godlike amounts of HP so while the battle animations are great it gets tedious
-fortunately you can pause and resume w/o having to restart from the beginning or can you (at least I think you can)

The developers at 1 point (forever ago) promised new levels, units and a faster pace and if they ever did that plus add a MAJOR UI (and AI in the case of the nitwit archer) overhaul, they’d have themselves an absolutely stellar game for this platform which I would recommend to anyone and everyone.  Unfortunately, in the impossibly absurd amount of time it took me to publish this review, there has never been another update and the dev website hasn’t been updated in just as long so I’m afraid this is all you get.  As it is then, what’s here is a beautiful experience to behold in the audio/visual dept but excessively frustrating to actually play due to some confounding play mechanics.

Version reviewed – 1.1
Reviewed on – iPhone 3GS 3.1.2
iTunes Link – Keep Defenders