A couple of weeks ago we posted a trailer for an interesting upcoming game from developer Legal Radiation called Line Defense, that looked to take the classic planet-protecting gameplay of Missile Command and blend it together with elements of brick-breaker Arkanoid and even a bit of the slice-and-dice gameplay of Fruit Ninja. Originally planned for release on August 26th, a few issues prevented that from happening, but thankfully the delay wasn’t very long at all as yesterday evening Line Defense (Free) wriggled its way into the App Store.
I’ve only spent a few minutes with Line Defense so far but I’m really enjoying what I’ve seen. The action is frantic as missiles and other debris rain down towards your city and you rush around the screen trying to draw defensive lines under them before they have a chance to make an impact. Once you’ve cleared enough of those, a boss battle ensues where the object is to bounce the boss’s attacks back towards them to deplete their life meter. If you can pull that off, it’s on to the next more difficult planet.
Line Defense is a very challenging game right from the get-go, but you’ll earn crystals as you play which go towards a ton of neat upgrades which should make your task more manageable. Being a free to play game you can of course opt to buy more crystals as IAP but it doesn’t seem especially necessary. There are occasional ads both of the opt-in variety and one after every few games, and unfortunately I see no way to buy an IAP to disable them. However, it’s not terribly intrusive and the forced ads are the kind you can skip after a few seconds anyway. That said, this just feels like it should be a fully premium game and the appearance of ads does cheapen the experience a bit.
Those are pretty minor nitpicks for an otherwise very unique and fun game, though. The fast-pace of the game and the need to manage tons of projectiles at once gives me great flashbacks of Flight Control. So far impressions from players in our forums are extremely positive as well, so if the concepts here intrigue you, I’d highly recommend taking Line Defense out for a spin.
