An Incredibly Clever And Tumbledown Take On Tower Defence
Countless Army plays the Uno Reverse card on tower defence games. Instead of building towers to protect from monster marauders, you are the monster marauders. There’s no fiddly upgrading: Countless Army is about the joy of overwhelming your enemy.
Now that’s a cracking ‘what if?’ for a game. A flipped tower defence. But you can imagine the problems it poses. In a tower defence game, the enemies just walk mindlessly forward. Where’s the fun or strategy in that? Countless Army has some good answers, but doesn’t get to them without some roadbumps.
It’s like Overlord never left
If you’ve ever looked at Skeletor or the Lich King as role models, then Countless Army may be your thing. You play a liche, a tall and bony regent, who can call on the legions of Hell to do their bidding. As most people do when they’re given an undead army, you choose world domination.
Each level looks exactly like a tower defence. There is a single base, castle or exit that needs protecting. If enough of the undead reach it, the defenders lose. To stop that from happening, there are all manner of fortifications. The most common are archers peeking out from sandbags, but there are also pulsing flame cannons, trebuchets, spike traps, barricades and more. Normally, these would be tools that you would use to win the tower defence, but in Countless Army they are your foes.
Luckily, there are multiple paths through those fortifications. One path might bypass the trebuchets, but they’re loaded with spike traps, and they auto-kill anyone who steps on them. The only hope is to create a carpet of dead bodies to walk on (Countless Army has some delightful gallows humour). The outline of a strategy starts to form: perhaps the best plan is to send the tanks, the damage sponges, through the trebuchets, and the fodder into the spike traps.
A Towering Offence
Your wave can be a composite of many different enemy types. One of our favourites was an Observer (casually dodging the D&D lawyers by not calling it a Beholder). When it dies, it stuns nearby ordnance, so positioning it first and then sending in the fast-moving but weak Banshees can be a good play.
There are multiple waves (this is a tower defence after all), so you don’t have to win on Turn 1. This brings in the second thread of strategy. When do you send your troops in? There are all manner of tricks and tips in this category. A Reaper unit hoovers up the souls of dead troops to their benefit: they might become more powerful or faster, depending on your upgrade choices. Letting a horde of the Emaciated die, only so a Reaper can suck them up through a straw in the following wave, is a perfectly valid strategy.
Overloading the enemy is one of the most successful strategies overall in Countless Army. If there’s a path that can’t be avoided, it’s often a good idea to send the fodder in first. Mass in particular is a real survivor: not only is it a bullet-sponge, it splits into smaller and smaller Masses before it dies.
Dos Estrellas knows that players will gravitate to this overload approach, so has an ace up its sleeve. You often can’t complete a level in one wave. There are outposts scattered on each path, and your troops will stop at them if they reach them. They’re both a bad and good thing: they stop your best troops, who may have been on a roll; but at the end of the wave, they confer a choice of perks. You can get a micro-benefit for your army, or a macro-benefit with a significant downside. It’s a spot of mid-level upgrading.
For Strategy Fans Who Want Something Different
Man, I love all this. There’s a bit of roguelike rewards here, some careful strategising there, and some emphasis on loadout management too. Even when a level is finished, I’m still planning: the resources I gain can be used to upgrade individual troops, or purchase more global benefits (as well as bigger, better troops for my roster). Optimising my army is one of the more significant courses of action.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve lost (Countless Army is brutal, even on the easiest settings) and gone away to do other things, only to come up with a new strategy. What if I conserved the Emaciated for the later waves, and swarmed them once the outposts were gone? What if I ignored Path 2 completely? What if I ground out a couple of rebellions on levels I have already completed, leveled up my Bothworlders, and ‘blinked’ my way past the flaming cannons?
As an achievement, I can’t commend it enough. It’s all well and good saying ‘invert a tower defence’, but there needed to be some strategy and difficulty in that inversion. Dos Estrellas have nailed it. Paths, wave composition, the waves themselves and upgrades are all superb ways of getting bank for your strategic buck.
Countless Issues
There is an inevitable ‘but’ here, and I think that ‘but’ can be attributed to budget. If I were a publisher with money pouring out of coffers, I would be handing some to Dos Estrellas now. Because all of its flaws – and there are a lot of them – come down to a lack of resource, a lack of time and a lack of polish. It can be a stubborn, barbed game to play, and it would have benefitted from reams of sandpaper to sand it all down.
Play for five minutes and you will feel many of them. Countless Army lets you cast spells, but they are far too manual, and the targets are so slow to move. By the time you’ve reached the killing fields, the fields are full of dead. It doesn’t help that these targets snap back to the middle of the screen after every use. Skipping time on the world map isn’t particularly well signposted, so you can easily miss how to grind and level up your characters. Settings keep resetting: it forgets your team composition all the time. There are hundreds of these little snags.
I just want to wave a magic wand and level everything up. The core is all there and frankly inspired. But it’s covered in brambles and ugly enough that sometimes clarity is lost (the icons for each troop confuse the hell out of me). With some lottery cash here, some EA money there, it could be something very special indeed. Codemasters: make it an official Overlord title!
An Inspired Strategy-Game-That-Could
I know it’s early, but Countless Army is the most fun I’ve had in a game this year. There will be games that usurp that title, and those games will be infinitely more lavish and better executed. But for now, this little strategy-game-that-could, this reversed Tower Defence, is attached to me like a limpet. Frankly, I’m fine with that relationship.
Important Links
Ever Wanted To Be The Villain? Countless Army Lets You Conquer The World – https://www.thexboxhub.com/ever-wanted-to-be-the-villain-countless-army-lets-you-conquer-the-world/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/countless-army/9N4BLFMKXLK3/0010
