Defend Your Castle Review
Defend Your Castle's charming visuals and low price tag help compensate for some simple gameplay.
Defend Your Castle, one of the first titles released in North America through Nintendo's newly minted WiiWare service, is less a game than it is a distraction, a simple and clever-looking novelty that baits you with some simple strategy that ultimately doesn't really go anywhere. You might call it a time-waster, but not a complete waste of time, due largely to Defend Your Castle's endearing, seemingly improvised visual style.

In between rounds you can repair damage taken, increase the amount of damage you can take, and build towers for archers, magicians, masons, and bombers. Perhaps most important is the conversion pool, which you can drop enemy soldiers into, turning them into friendly soldiers that you use to fill your various towers. How you choose to allocate your soldiers is the most strategic thing about Defend Your Castle, though it's often easy to compensate for poor allocation choices with some speedy soldier-flinging.
So you've got some real-time combat, and some simple resource management, but the basic gameplay remains mostly static from one round to the next. Rounds get longer, enemies become faster and more numerous, and you can unlock some additional spells for your magicians, but it's not much. Also, pro tip: the game takes its sweet time ramping up the difficulty, to the point that you're probably better off just ignoring the normal difficulty and going straight for heroic. There's four-player support in here as well, which adds the fun little kink of rewarding the top-scoring player in each round with the sole ability to allocate soldiers and activate magic attacks in the following round. Really, the best thing about the gameplay is just how seemingly manic it can get at higher levels.

The presentation goes a long way towards making Defend Your Castle a worthwhile experience, but after a few hours of fending off hordes of DIY enemies, I was done with it. There's a much more involved, much more interesting game to be made here, though I suppose part of the appeal of Defend Your Castle is that it's relatively low-impact gaming.