1st Impressions

Marbles Tower Defense is one of the better TD games that I have played. In games like FieldRunners, your enemy’s health deteriorates as you shoot at them. In this case though, marbles are the enemy and they change colors as they diminish in strength. In all, there are nine different marble types, and the strangest types require the strongest towers in order to defeat.

The marbles roll down one of eight designed tracks, so no free-form open-field type options are available. Each level has three different difficulty levels. Different colored stars indicate which tracks you have completed the 49-rounds on in each difficulty level.

Not only are there eight unique towers with multiple upgrade options available, but you can also utilize spike strips, oil patches, and grenades to slow the progress of the marbles. New items can be placed both during and in-between each of the rounds. Doing this between rounds is made easier with the manual starting of each round. I also like the feature to turn the game’s sound off and listen to my own iTunes tracks during game play.

Other than additional tracks, it would be nice if there was an option to calculate some kind of scoring based on how long a track/level took to complete and how much money you have left. Ability to then post these to OpenFeint, Twitter, and/or Facebook would be cool as well. Finally, I would love an option to replace the start button with a pause button once play starts and have it automatically start up each round with possibly a little status window showing how many rounds completed and to go.

At $0.99, this game is highly recommended to those that like the TD genre. I’d give it 4.5 stars out of 5.