Below are user reviews of Defender and on the right are links to professionally written reviews.
The summary of review scores shows the distribution of scores given by the professional reviewers for Defender.
Column height indicates the number of reviews with a score within the range shown at the bottom of the column.
Higher scores (columns further towards the right) are better.
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User Reviews (1 - 5 of 5)
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Definitely needed more development time
3
Rating: 3,
Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 24, 2008
Author: Amazon User
In this game you fly your little spaceship around and shoot a variety of different enemy ships, through a variety of environments. Once you've built up a few points, you can move on to better types of ships and purchase weapons upgrades. I chose the fastest and most maneuverable ship, which also had a very nice variety of weapons once you purchased all the upgrades.
The game is pretty fun through the first half, with each level getting progressively harder. However, once you get through a couple of fairly difficult levels in the middle of the game, it's like, what happened? After taking 20 or so attempts to get through one level, and 15 attempts to get through the next, I then made it through the next five or so levels on the first try, and it was easy! It's as if they didn't have time to finish developing these later levels. There's also a bug in the game: a transport ship is coming in for landing and you're supposed to protect it. However, it gets stuck up in midair, and after flying around for ten minutes with nothing to do, I finally destroyed it. At least that got the game moving again. Another thing that sucks is that if you purchase an extra life for your ship, you'll lose it after one mission. Therefore there's almost no point in buying that upgrade.
The last level is at least a little bit more challenging, but I still made it through on the first try (though just barely). Overall, it was fun flying my little ship around, but the complete lack of any sort of challenge in the second part of the game was a real disappointment.
Not Bad
3
Rating: 3,
Useful: 1 / 13
Date: February 11, 2003
Author: Amazon User
This game isn't to bad if you have some time blow and are bored, otherwise don't get it.
This game is very cool.
4
Rating: 4,
Useful: 2 / 4
Date: April 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User
This game is very challenging and fun. It does get very hard real quick and for rookie gamer like me that has been a struggle. I enjoy the game and have ordered a gaming guide to help me through the levels.
Had so much potential
3
Rating: 3,
Useful: 6 / 8
Date: March 18, 2003
Author: Amazon User
Let me start out by saying this could have been the Devil May Cry of flight simulators. You start out with a ship, a machine gun and some missiles, you go against a swarm of bugs were you are just basically firing into them and wasting every enemy you see. The game starts out with a basic tutorial to get you into the game and what its requirements are. Then you get thrown into the war against the manti and help the GSA slowly push them back to earth. One of the basic problems I had with the game is the missions on the moon, they were incredibly hard on easy mode, now the problem with this is that if a player wants to start out a game they have never played before they should be able to go through the levels on easy with in the first four tries, otherwise the player shouldn't be able to select difficult modes at all and if you are going to make it incredibly hard you should make the game incredibly fun as a counter. Unfortunately this game was fun but not that fun.
Pros-
-Enemies lit by a glow on the screen.
-Friendly units let by a blue glow in the screen.
-Different ships and weapons to choose from including missiles, bombs, big bombs, lasers and machine guns, there are a variety of each.
-Ships are unique looking and have their own unique ability.
Cons-
-The game gets way to hard way to fast.
-Some units are overly strong.
Technically sound in every way- but somehow lacking...
4
Rating: 4,
Useful: 6 / 8
Date: June 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User
This is one of those games that is technically sound in every way:
- Good cutscenes
- Easy to learn interface controls
- Use of sound effects from original Defender game
- Good graphics quality
- Nice to see a bit of history about the old Defender game in the Extras.
If you basically want a 3D version of the original Defender arcade game, then this game fits the bill.
If you want something that provides new ideas to the genre that isn't already covered in Wing Commander, Colony Wars, Jedi Starfighter, etc... then you are out of luck.
It's clear Midway has the technical talent to pull off any game they desire. Now it's a question of whether they can pull of FUN games. In Defender I think Midway was banking on folks who grew up with the original Defender. Unfortunately today's generation of video gamers are too sophisticated for that.
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