Earlier this morning, Eli and I checked out Blade Guardian ($0.99). It’s a Mistwalker-designed tower defense game with what theoretically should be a hot hook: a randomly spawning roving tower that can morph into a ball and roll through creeps. In practice, it’s not so cool. In addition to wrecking enemies, these balls also demolish your towers, setting you up to get rocked by anything that spawns after the initial destruction.

On a macro-level, we’re pretty surprised by just how uninspired Blade Guardian is. Tower defense is a crowded genre that’s full of games with cooler hooks, scenario design, and way better art and sound production values all clawing for our attention. Blade Guardian strikes us as a game that isn’t informed by the titles before it, and it suffers for not taking any notes.

We might have more on this in the future, but if you’re looking for some video of the game in action, we’ve got some right here: