McDroid is a cute cel-shaded Tower Defense game. You play as a quirky little robot who has found his home planet absolutely crawling with unwanted guests, and your mission is to help the little guy save his planet from the ugly nasties! Unfortunately, not all of them are little, as you’ll soon discover!

 

In order to protect your shuttle, you have to build turrets that shoot laser bolts at the enemies. McDroid can fix said turrets between battles or during if needed. You can collect green strawberry seeds and plant them, and once they pop out you can collect the strawberries and carry them back to your shuttle. When you have enough strawberries, you can buy more turrets and fill the map’s turret locations to better defend the area.

Each level has a varying number of waves to defend against. The first three levels are pretty simple and basically serve as tutorials, but the difficulty spike ramps up at around level 5 quite considerably, so instead of starting slowly you are kind of thrown into the deep end. I felt it would have been a much better game if the difficulty spike was a little bit more slow and steady.

So as I said, in each level you must collect strawberry seeds, plant them, harvest them and buy turrets, and then rinse and repeat as needed. As your turrets do their job, you must go round each turret to make sure they are at full health, and while doing so you also have to quickly zoom around the map collecting blue crystals which you use to fund development and research for new weapons, shields and more, There are so many things to develop and upgrade it will take many hours to get them all, so collect as many of those blue crystals as you can.

Each level has a set of objectives to meet, but they’re extremely hard to read on the TV! Even a person with perfect 20/20 vision would struggle to read them. No idea why the devs would create virtually unreadable texts, but luckily it doesn’t get in the way of the fun gameplay mechanics.

The enemies come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from blue slugs to giant spiders to snails with TEETH! These giant tooth creatures can take a bite and kill your turrets forcing you to buy more before you are overwhelmed. The gameplay can get a little frantic as you zoom McDroid around the level collecting resources and fixing or rebuilding turrets. Once you have researched upgrades they take a while for you to purchase, so make sure you stock up on strawberries before the last wave as you will no longer be able to plant or harvest strawberries anymore!

Each level will rate you with stars, and you can get them by collecting the yellow seeds from defeated enemies. This adds some replay value to McDroid if you want to get three stars on all levels. On top of that, you have challenge maps – the first set of challenges are unlocked after completing level 3. In these challenge levels, waves are unlimited, which makes them the best place to farm blue crystals. The aim of a challenge level is to protect yourself and your ship from the enemy onslaught by building turrets and upgrading when necessary, zooming around collecting yellow seeds and blue crystals. On top of that, you have the arena levels, where waves here are also unlimited, but you have a bit more freedom with weapon placements – not a whole lot different from the challenge levels, but still very fun.

The game has no real story, but it is full of witty humor that players will enjoy. The design is solid, but there is a slight bug that can leave you stuck on the shuttle while transferring strawberries, so don’t get too close to the shuttle. McDroid is a very fun tower defense game that I definitely recommend.

[review pros=”Cute cel-shaded art style
Lots of levels to enjoy.
Witty humor.” cons=”Considerable difficulty bump might frustrate some” score=81]

Disclaimer
This review is based on a copy of McDroid provided by Grip Games