We first heard grumblings of long-time console and PC developer Paradox Interactive's newest title Defenders of Ardania back in February of this year, with a new trailer and release date being revealed just last month. Now, Defenders of Ardania [$4.99/Lite] has finally hit the App Store and is available for purchase as we speak (well maybe not speaking, since I'm typing and you're reading, but you get the point).

We briefly got to check out Defenders of Ardania in an extremely early state at GDC this year, and based on the trailer released last month it's made a ton of progress since then. As you can see for yourself, the visuals look quite splendid, but it's the twist on the traditional tower defense formula that excites me the most. You see, you set up your defensive towers in the most strategic way possible in order to fend of the oncoming hordes of enemies, but you're also able to send out waves of your own troops to get down and dirty with the enemy up close and personal in the battlefield. It's the type of subtle twist that might really make Defenders of Ardania stand out from the pack.

We'll be diving into Defenders of Ardania to see if it's as good as the trailer would have us believe, but I've got a pretty good feeling about it. If you're the "live life on the edge" type and don't want to wait around for our review, or if you're already sold on the pedigree of Paradox Interactive and would like to support their very first iOS effort, then feel free to mash away at the link below. Don't forget that there's a lite version to try first and you can also scour the game's forum thread for player impressions.

Tower defense games are a dime a dozen these days and Wild Defense [99¢/$1.99], in spite of its zesty-fresh tropical flavor, doesn't bring anything really new to the table. Still, that doesn't stop it being a moderately entertaining affair. Less a game for the casual enthusiast and more for the hardcore fan, this one is for those who just have to have another tower defense game on their phones.

Functionality-wise, Wild Defense will be rather cut and dry for tower defense aficionados. Your objective is a simple one: protect your fortress from the enemy waves. To accomplish this, you'll have to drag and drop your units onto strategic locations in the map, all the while trying to maintain a proper composition of troops to ensure that you can deal with the various enemy types. In addition, you'll also have to do things like purchase weapons for your army, work with bombs, cast spells, defeat bosses and occasionally play the Wild Defense equivalent of Russian Roulette.

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Way back in February we brought you the news that Paradox Interactive, a highly regarded developer of PC and console titles, was getting ready to dip its toes into the world of iOS gaming with their upcoming tower defense game Defenders of Ardania. While the tower defense genre is a well-treaded path on the App Store already, that hasn't stopped titles that used innovative ideas from standing out from the pack. For example, this year's Anomaly Warzone Earth [$1.99/UHD] flipped tower defense on its ear by having you play the attackers trying to take out the defense towers, rather than the other way around.

Defenders of Ardania will utilize this "tower offense" style somewhat too, while actually still remaining a traditional-style tower defense game at its core. You'll place various types of towers around each map strategically in an effort to stop the oncoming stream of attackers, however you will also be able to send out your own stream of offensive troops to battle against the enemy head on in the field. In addition to these two attack types, there will be some pretty intense looking magic spells to cast upon your enemy as well.

The tricky part of all this is that your towers, magic spells, and offensive troops will all be powered from the same pool of mana. So, you'll need to figure out how best to utilize each one while not completely depleting your mana resources. It all sounds quite interesting, and a nice departure from most other tower defense games. Defenders of Ardania is slated for a December 6th release on multiple platforms including the iPad. We'll certainly be giving it a look when it hits the App Store early next month.

As wonderful of a thing as the App Store is, it comes with a heck of a seedy underbelly of unscrupulous developers and I really hate how often it seems like we're posting these rip-off alerts lately. Shameless clones are one thing, but flat out stealing a game's assets is an entirely different animal. Today's victims are the guys from Ironhide Game Studio, who currently have three different Flash games out in the wild. Kingdom Rush is their most popular, which is currently ripping up the charts on the various Flash game portal sites, and is boasting 40 million total plays worldwide. You can add one more to that number by clicking here and checking it out, it's a pretty cool little tower defense game.

In late July, Ironhide Games released Kingdom Rush, and in the last few weeks of October, My Yayi released the same game on the App Store… Although, you'll notice that the Ironhide and Armor Games logos have been removed, making the whole thing that much more damning. In fact, if you want to see a ton of other ripped assets, click the above image for a full-size comparison of multiple levels.

The guys from Ironhide Games have already explored all the regular channels to get the game taken down, including sending copyright infringement notices, contacting Apple, and even hiring outside consultants to help get it removed. Yet, it remains. We've heard the actual process of getting a stolen game removed can be rather slow from other developers who have experienced similar problems, but it's no-doubt incredibly painful for the original creators to look at the game up on the App Store in the meantime.

Saving Moo [$0.99 / HD], one of several recent offerings from ClickGamer, is the latest addition to the elusive genre of Cow Defense. If rescuing our four-legged brethren suits your fancy (or if you’re a fan of certain classic tower defense games), then Saving Moo’s weird story and presentation, combined with solid tower defense gameplay elements, should work for you.

Saving Moo puts you in the role of a farmer that acquired psychic powers after an alien abduction. In order to prevent future abductions, you must use the farmer’s newfound powers to telekinetically place weapons on your cows to ward off the impending UFO invasion. Even though the story is mainly told through a short introductory cutscene, I still found it hilarious and absolutely befitting for the sort of offbeat attitude that Saving Moo offers.

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Dungeon Defenders: Second Wave (see what Trendy did there) will be released as a free update to the iOS versions of Dungeon Defenders: First Wave [$2.99] tomorrow, the developer has told us via an e-mail release. According to Trendy, Second Wave addresses "many of the issues" from the first game, including the horrendously cluttered UI and clunky menus that kept us from enjoying its first try at an iOS port of its downloadable game.

In addition to these improvements, Second Wave will see "performance improvements," and a player-versus-player content package called "Arena." If you pop out your eyeglasses, you'll be able to see some of these tweaks and adds in its newly-released trailer.

In case you didn't know, Dungeon Defenders is now available on Xbox Live Arcade and as a PC release on Steam. These versions are particularly good according to media types, so you might want to consider checking those out if you're into the game's hack-and-slash meets tower defense action.

With the proliferation of camera-equipped smartphones that also double as mobile gaming systems in the last few years, the amount of augmented reality apps and games has surged. While there are a ton of ingenious non-gaming ways to use AR on your smartphone, the vast majority of the games that used the technology boiled down to slapping some graphical assets onto your device's camera view and calling it a game, with little regard for how the augmented reality portion actually affected or enhanced the gameplay.

One title that bucked that trend and changed how I feel about most AR games was last year's ARDefender [99¢] from French developer Int 13. ARDefender had you printing out a special diagram from the ARDefender website (or as we've come to find, just displaying the diagram on a separate device or computer screen) which would then be read by the game using the camera on your iPhone or iPod touch. The game would create a tower on top of this diagram, making it appear that it was actually there in the space where your camera was pointed. Then enemies would come after this tower in waves, and you'd use an assortment of weaponry affixed to the top of your tower to fend them off.

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I discovered tower defense late in my gaming career. I have no good justification for this. Perhaps I was too busy burying my face into all the RPGs and sidescrollers I could find. However, my intro game into the genre was PixelJunk Monsters, and if you gotta discover late, it may as well be with one of the genre's best entries. Ever since, I salivate Pavlovian-style every time someone murmurs the words "tower defense," and I had the same reaction when Gem Keeper [$2.99] was mentioned around the Touch Arcade office. I also was digging the fact that NCSoft made it, because I like them and I wanted to see how their skills would translate to iOS.

Like any proper tower defense title, Gem Keeper has plenty of levels to keep your building skills busy. 30 are available in total, and over the course of gameplay you have the ability to earn 14 different towers to use to strategically keep baddies out of your fortress. You'll start slow, with only a basic gunfire tower and a few bombs at your disposal. However, soon enough you'll be slowing em down with sticky goo and firing giant spiked cannonballs. I loved that you had the option to switch between Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty at anytime, even right before you start a level. Gem Keeper doesn't disappoint when it comes to the challenge either, but I'll return to that later.

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Jelly Defense [$2.99], a tower defense game that absolutely crushes it on the art and production front, is apparently riding a wave of success. Creator Infinite Dreams shot us over a press release this morning noting how it's taken a couple of number one App Store chart spots across the globe, but it also tipped us off on a 'huge' update that hit the other day. The headliner is the game's new "easy" or baby mode, which gives lays off on the casual among us. Courtesy of a few mystery tweaks, Jelly Defense is now also better performing and more balanced.

I'll summon my inner Billy Mays here and mention that's not all -- users can now turn off the sound and music in the game, speed-up the waves instead of just inviting more, and enjoy the wonders of 'improved coin collecting.' Cool!

As I mentioned to Eli earlier today, just looking at Jelly Defense makes me happy. It looks sharp, it nails cute, and it's also a pretty competent tower defense game. I reviewed it this month, by the way, if you're in the market for something like this.

Yesterday, TouchArcade attended EA's Naughty or Nice game event in New York and spent time with a number of just-announced titles on the way from Chillingo. Perhaps the most stand-0ut game of the lot is Zombie Wonderland 2, sequel to the June 2010 release Zombie Wonderland [App Store]. As in the original, the upcoming sequel puts you in the shoes of Chuck, the renowned Zombie Cleaner of the pleasant little '50s Americana town, Niceville. While, before, your task was to keep the homes of your clients as clean and as zombie-free as possible, your new order of business is a bit more complex a proposition.

Now, while we aren't allowed to get into to many details as far as the storyline goes, just yet, I can tell you that the rooms you will be defending (and cleaning) are, this time around, spread throughout time. From the local museum, which serves as a kind of time-hub, you will be traveling to medieval castles, ancient Egyptian crypts, Viking halls, and ancient Japanese dwellings -- all riddled with zombies that make terrible stains when dispatched.

Some of the tasks that must be completed involve several stages set in different locations and / or times. For instance, one of your clients, Vlad the vampire, has given up drinking blood and moved over to milk. So you must travel through time to get him a glass of milk by milking a cow in a zombie-swarmed barn. Each of the temporally far-flung locales features its own mini-boss that appears and drives the zombies into attack frenzies that make the task of keeping the rooms clean and zombie-free quite a challenge.

While the original release featured four locations, four weapons, and five types of zombies, Zombie Wonderland 2 delivers 25 locations, 25 weapons, and 22 types of zombies, as well as a mega-boss zombie. Some of the weapons available are special bullets, medusa bullets, gnawers, turrets, lightning bottles, killer grass, the brain toy -- even a Roomba(-like robotic vacuum). Weapons can be damaged by zombies, but can also be repaired. New weapons can be quickly bought via in-app purchases or unlocked through dedicated gameplay.

Some areas of the town's museum are visibly under construction, and serve as placeholders for additional areas that will arrive in updates, down the road.

We'll take a closer look at Zombie Wonderland 2 when it arrives sometime before Christmas, but, however we rate it, it's sure to is sure to take the crown as far as number of genres represented. This survival cleaning, time management, tower defense zombie shooter will be priced at $0.99.

Anomaly Warzone Earth [$1.99] just became an even crazier-good proposition for iPad 2 owners: 11 Bit Studios has just released an update for both versions of the already fantastic-looking game, adding in an extra layer or two of graphical awesome specifically for the platform. New blur and glow effects, as well as enhanced shadowing, contrast, saturation, and much more dynamic environmental touches have been added in addition to bug fixes and Universal support.

Outside of the new iPad 2 eye candy -- and to be clear, the game still looks great post-update -- 11 Bit has added that new Squad Assault Rearmed map and also fixed that pesky Commander Trials issue that has plagued the game since release. Oh! And Facebook posting is now better.

As if that wasn't enough Anomaly news for your eyeholes, we've got some sale details to spill: the game is currently available at $1.99 for a limited time. We can’t be friends anymore if you don’t buy it at this price (since it’s so good and all).

Infinite Dreams’ Jelly Defense [$.99] is a well-made by-the-numbers tower defense joint with an embarrassingly unorthodox and captivating art direction that arterially informs and fleshes out its otherwise boring core mechanics. Without this direction it’d look and feel as flat as a modern FPS, but its detail, vividness, liveliness, and the raw skillfulness employed in making it this way morph it into an experience.

Conventional tower defense games are demanding, punitive, and scripted pretty harshly. You usually have to “get” the vision the designer had in mind for levels, which leaves a lot to be desired from a play perspective. Jelly Defense doesn’t depart from these norms, nor does it do much to differentiate on any other level outside of its look. You build towers. Those towers fire on specific enemy types and have certain effects on them as they crawl towards an ultimate end goal. If they reach the goal enough, you lose. If you pick bad towers, you lose. If you try to be unconventional, you lose. If you spend poorly, you lose. There’s a lot of losing in general until you understand and execute on proper placements, upgrade paths, and memorize the order of waves. (more...)

When it comes to the crowded Tower Defense genre, a game truly needs to take an innovative (or extremely well-produced) approach in order to make its mark. Unfortunately, Tiny Defense [$0.99] doesn’t really satisfy this lofty goal. Sure, Tiny Defense manages to take the core gameplay of Plants vs Zombies and offer a twist on the traditional formula (as well as a vastly different setting), but it just doesn’t offer any sort of gameplay  experience that can’t be found in better games in the genre.

As mentioned above, Tiny Defense closely mimics tower defense gameplay made popular by Plants vs Zombies – gamers place various attacking and support units on the right side of the screen in order to defend against baddies coming in from the left. If any enemies get to the other side, you lose a life. Lose enough lives, and the game is over. Tiny Defense differs somewhat in its theme and perspective. Instead of plants, you control a variety of robotic units that are defended against evil (and usually much bigger) robots. Also, instead of the gameplay arena taking place from a top-down perspective, Tiny Defense has a purely 2D perspective.

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There are two things I want in life: (a) more content in 11 Bit Studio’s Anomaly: Warzone Earth [$1.99 / HD] and (b) a working Space Marine chain-sword that doubles as a potato peeler. I’ll never get the latter, but the chances on the former seem great right now. 11 Bit just wrapped up an interview with relative game Web site newcomers Split Kick and confirmed that one more Squad Assault level is coming to the App Store version of the reverse tower defense game in a fresh update. Even better, more content is being planned alongside a possible sequel.

Talk about a treasure trove of information, right? Here’s 11 Bit’s Pawel Miechowski’s relevant newsy-news words:

Currently an update is on the way to Anomaly WE on App Store. Apart from the several fixes, it’ll deliver a new Squad Assault mode and it is placed in Baghdad setting too. Additional downloadable content for iOS version is in the works and it’ll introduce some new improvements to the concept and some new locations, although that levels are desert-based too. Much of the “processing capacity” is used for the development of other versions that I mentioned, so we do not have enough powers to produce extra content for PC/Mac version now. However, we’ll do in the future. We’re also planning content for the possible sequel and there are brand new ideas and brand new locations considered.

On the studio's blog last week, 11 Bit added that this update, in addition to bug fixes, will also make the HD version Universal. This means that if you held out on iPhone version, you'll get it for free with a download of the iPad one.

Actually, let’s add a third thing to that list. As great as the first game is and as powerful as the prospect of downloadable content for it is, I’d like to go ahead say that I want a new Anomaly game with new locations, new missions, new powers, and new mechanics, too please. Thanks, guys!

[Via Split Kick]

If you missed out on our WWDC preview, allow me to calibrate your expectations about Tiny Heroes [$2.99], a new tower defense title from Simutronics Corp. You may have heard that the team behind this game was headed up by David Whatley, the developer of the outstanding geoDefense [$1.99 / Lite] and geoDefense Swarm [$1.99]. Already your brain may be whirring along, thinking about upgradeable towers and mazing. Stop that. You won't find those here. And you won't miss them, either.

In Tiny Heroes, you are the master of a dungeon rich with treasure. In classic Dungeons & Dragons style, where there is treasure, there are heroes. Are you going to sit back and let them take your treasure? Heck no! So you set up defenses in their way, and who can blame you if a few of those defenses are a touch lethal? You have liability insurance, right?

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