Horn Swaggle Islands – 400 points – Strategy & Simulation – Download

Horn Swaggle Islands is a pirate-themed tower defense game coming from developer Pencel Games.

For the uninitiated, tower defense games see you try to stop ever increasing waves of enemies from reaching a certain point of the map by buying and placing a variety of weapons  such as turrets and cannons. You are given a certain amount of ‘life’ which depletes every time an enemy reaches one of the exits. Each time you kill an enemy you are given money that allows you to purchase more weapons or upgrade existing ones.

Horn Swaggle Islands certainly gets the basics spot on. It has the right balance of giving you the opportunity to approach most levels how you see fit but also throws in some interesting level designs that make the game play more as a puzzle game in which you have to find the right areas to build and choose the correct weaponry in each of these locations. With fifteen levels, most taking around 20-30 minutes to complete, there is a good amount of content in the game.

The selection of weapons has been kept to a small but efficient set. Unlike most tower defence games Horn Swaggle Islands doesn’t have flying enemies so you don’t need to set up two different sets of weapons, I enjoyed the fact that I didn’t have to worry about investing money just for a couple of waves of enemies and I could focus on the main waves.

So what sets Horn Swaggle Islands apart from other tower defence games? Well in addition to the puzzle-like levels mentioned above you can move any of your weapons around at any point with no penalty. This is a handy feature and allows you to quickly change your strategies and results in a lot less frustration when you invest in the wrong place.  Also, on most maps there are red x’s placed on the ground, if you can make the enemy walk over these you are rewarded with either extra cash or a weapon.

The presentation of the game also deserves praise. It’s appealing pirate theme is well done and the enemies, whilst very simple, fit the style of the game well. The sound also fits in nicely even if it’s more sound effects than music. One worrying element though is the text and interface is quite small and hard to see. This is more of a problem on SDTV’s but may also be an issue on your HDTV depending on it’s size.

So overall Horn Swaggle Islands is a very good tower defence game that features solid core mechanics and brings some new things to the genre, my concerns from the trial that the price was too high have been eased with the amount of content and the length of each level and most importantly the game is fun to play.

Solid mechanics and fun to play so make sure to check it out.

5 Responses to “Review: Horn Swaggle Islands”

1. Jigsaw hc says:

   August 3, 2009 at 8:55 am

   I’m really enjoying it as well. Although I’m finding it pretty challenging so I am probably doing something wrong.
2. Sam says:

   August 3, 2009 at 9:53 am

   Try changing the difficulty to ‘cabin boy’.
3. Beringela says:

   August 3, 2009 at 12:37 pm

   Here are some Beginners Tips for playing Horn Swaggle Islands:

   - In general it is better to upgrade one turret a lot rather than many turrets a little.
   - For the bosses you need the single shot turrets – the Gun, Double Gun or Crow’s Nest, a good upgrade and a touch of experience. The Cannons are ok-ish at the bosses and the Cutlass is poor.
   - It is important to place a turret so that it gets to use as much of its range as possible, so the Crow’s Nest should be kept towards the center of the action and the single Guns and Cannons towards the edge of the routes.
   - Experience gained by turrets is important too, so if a turret has leveled up a lot (white upgrade pips visible) then it’s a good idea for it to be placed somewhere it can get kill experience (orange experience pips visible).
   - One fun feature that’s there is the ability to switch off all towers’ firing. It can be pretty entertaining if you are doing well to hold down the left thumbstick to prevent turrets firing for a while, then really let rip when there are tons of enemy pirates on the screen.
4. XboxHornet says:

   August 4, 2009 at 2:14 am

   A great Indie game, beginners should choose Cabin Boy difficulty as Captian is quite hard, but I intend to stick with it.
5. Horn Swaggle Island review « XboxHornet says:

   August 6, 2009 at 2:59 am

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