Most tower defense games revolve around placing obstacles and weapons along pathways so you can crush your enemy before they make their way to your tower. This formula has worked countless times in the past. What’s less common is when your tower is your primary source of offense. Hills of Glory 3D takes the typical tower defense model and turns your defenseless tower into a killing machine.
Most tower defense games revolve around placing obstacles and weapons along pathways so you can crush your enemy before they make their way to your tower. This formula has worked countless times in the past. What’s less common is when your tower is your primary source of offense. Hills of Glory 3D takes the typical tower defense model and turns your defenseless tower into a killing machine.
Hills of Glory 3D takes place during World War II. You’re given control of a base. During each stage, you’ll be attacked by waves of enemies coming from all directions, and you need to use the base’s weaponry to take them out. Unlike many tower defense games, you won’t be placing turrets along pathways, and nothing works on it’s own. Instead, your tower is equipped with a wide variety of short range guns and long-range explosives, inviting enemy troops to walk over and test their luck.
The enemy is only about as dangerous as it looks. Hills of Glory 3D uses cartoon-like visuals, that help the game from taking itself too seriously. However, this doesn’t mean the visuals aren’t sharp. While it’s far from the prettiest Android title, the character models are smooth, the environments are gorgeous, and the animations are hilariously hyperbolic. The way the foot soldiers march toward the base is a perfect way to illustrate how weak they are individually. Similarly, the slow approach of a tank lets your know of its power and range.
Despite enemies looking and acting in ways that feel right, the difficulty isn’t all there. There are times where massive waves of enemies can be overwhelming, but the majority of the time they can be easily defeated by the base’s arsenal. The base itself fires off rifles, machine guns, flamethrowers, and mortars—all of which will be used frequently. For extra help, there’s a variety of air support, such as napalm strikes and equipment drops. Air drops and dead enemies will often spawn crates that provide health, gold, and other goodies.
The array of weapons and the frequency of drops puts Hills of Glory 3D a tad on the easy side, but the amount of content helps make up for it. At the end of every stage, you’re scored on various stats. If you do well enough, you’ll receive a medal. The medals don’t exist for much outside of completion tracking, but trying to earn all the medals in every stage will add much-needed difficulty. The bigger post-match feature is earning and spending gold. While you can pick up gold from enemy crates, you also earn a bit from playing well and gaining experience points. This gold can be used to upgrade equipment and unlock new features. These upgrades aren’t necessary for success, but it’d be much harder without them.
Hills of Glory 3D does a lot to make it stand out from other tower defense titles, but it does come with a few issues. The most apparent problem is the camera. With enemies constantly attacking from all sides, it would be nice to have the options to zoom out and see the entire battlefield. Even though the heads-up display points toward advancing troops, moving the screen during heated combat can become a chore. This leads to the other issue, which is control. Most of the controls are based on swiping and tapping. In most instances, this works well, but certain commands are similar enough where the wrong one occasionally pops up. This isn’t a game-breaking flaw, but it does cause a good amount of annoyance.
Even with some problems, Hills of Glory 3D does many things right. The sheer amount of firepower packed into the base gives a nice change of pace to other tower defense titles. Add on the beautiful visuals, post-level rankings, and tons of upgrades and there’s a lot of fun to be had. Hardcore tower defense fans may not find the difficulty to be all too impressive, but with a free price tag there’s no reason to not give it a shot.
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