Does the feeling of joy that comes from destroying invading aliens that threaten your home base with lasers and space catapults ever get old? While playing Mistwalker’s newest iOS title, Blade Guardian, so far the answer is no, no it doesn’t.

Blade Guardian is a tower defense game where players use various weapons to shoot at, slow down, or utterly destroy waves of invading alien forces that wish to get to the player’s base. What makes Blade Guardian stand out a bit more from the slew of tower defense games currently on the market is the player’s ability to lay down metallic walls to control the path the aliens will have to take to get to the base.

The weapons themselves don’t do much to stand out from the crowd. There are upgradable cannons, ice based weapons to slow enemies down, and giant laser towers that are great for shooting enemies with a powerful blast from a great distance, but Blade Guardian makes up for that in two ways. One, the alien forces themselves are well varied, containing differing speeds, defenses, abilities and even methods to get around the map. And two, the Blade Guardians themselves, which are available from shooting down transporters that fly around the stage add an interesting mechanic to the game. These machines roam around the map, obliterating approaching enemies, but are also able to destroy the spawning points of the aliens themselves, and cutting off some of their routes to the base. Like many of the other weapons, Blade Guardians can be upgraded using gold, and are valuable to victory. Longer levels can be completed early by using the Blade Guardians to destroy all spawning points.

Mechanically speaking, the game is pretty solid, and the game is a visual treat, with the different animations and designs of the alien species. However, Blade Guardian is not without its faults. It suffers from the all too common tower defense problem of repetitive sound effects, and while these normally fade away after a while, the games lack of soundtrack during the actual levels makes the sounds stand out more, especially in later levels that have upwards of fifty waves of enemies to fight through.

Blade Guardian is a fairly beautiful game that does enough things right and keeps itself interesting to help it stand out in the tower defense genre, and the small handful of faults it does have could be easily fixed in future updates. The game is scheduled to be released on October 1st and is well worth picking up.

The Good

+Wide variety of enemies to take down
+Altering the enemies’ path adds a level of strategy to the game
+Blade Guardians are awesome

The Bad

-Small handful of weapons with very limited upgrades
-No soundtrack makes the long levels feel longer

The Verdict

Blade Guardian is another fun iOS title from Mistwalker. I look forward to their future projects.