Lock's Quest Review

Tower defence has had such a good run on the internet - and now on downloadable services - that it was only a matter of time before someone bound it to an isometric RPG and stuffed it full of spiky hair and hitpoints. With that matter of time now up, Lock's Quest throws us into the world of archineers - canny builders who erect massive fortifications in minutes and then run around shoring them up while Frankenstein's clockwork robots bash away from the outside.

It's more of a strategy ARPG than tower defence, but the inspiration is clear, and it has the same compelling quality. At the start of most missions you're given a couple of minutes to build walls and lay traps, and then you go into battle mode. Here you take control of the eponymous Lock, and send him running around repairing damage as the forces of the unashamedly evil Lord Agony lay siege. As enemy numbers grow and new units like archers, wizards and flyers present themselves, your build strategy evolves and you salvage materials to make new turrets and traps.

Controls for the build and battle phases differ, but both are well explained and intuitive to boot. Building involves selecting types of wall, turret and trap from a touch-screen selection menu and dragging and dropping them onto a grid that overlays the terrain. You can rotate them by tapping the left shoulder (or switch to the right shoulder if you're left-handed), and scroll the map with the d-pad (or face buttons). This allows you to pinpoint the dark ground that enemies emerge from so that you can adjust your defensive position to fit the scenario.

As you encounter more complex enemies, you get to play with new types of turret and trap. These are constructed out of the broken parts of the opposition, and in order to add them to your build menu you first have to piece them together in a simple stylus-driven mini-game, where you're shown what a turret or trap should look like and asked to piece it together from bits of scrap strewn around the touch-screen. It's very simple, but for developer 5th Cell it's the start of a theme where everything is a game or a simple puzzle in and of itself. Combat, when you do come toe to toe with enemies instead of standing behind a wall, involves tapping numbered icons or spinning a wheel, and as you run up and down the lines repairing defences you're asked to draw little semi-circles back and forward to operate a ratchet.

Combat outside the walls is okay, but the best fun is to be found running the line repairing turrets as they do the fighting.

Another thing to consider is the amount of resource at your disposal. You collect this - the mystical "source" energy that is found in the wells you're protecting, and used by Lord Agony to power the evil clockwork army you fight - by harvesting the robotic souls of enemies your traps and turrets dispatch, and then spend it on construction and repairs. You can also build up an extra stock back at the capital city of Antonia by manning the siege tower - a separate, throwaway 2D mini-game where enemies advance and you have to measure cannonball trajectories to hit them. This isn't that great - and you'll groan when it's forced upon you from time to time - but it's passable.

While the game's real-time strategy bastardisation of tower defence is the focus, Lock's Quest also occasionally leans closer to its other, ARPG inspiration and dials up the story and combat. The former throws up a few surprises, but mostly it's standard fare - you save someone in peril, you go straight to the top of the class in a strange new world, everything is not as it seems, all the people you meet in villages have nothing interesting to say (and the cat says "Moo"), and there's a fair bit of angst. Applause for the animations, though, which make the most of limited screen-space with convincing limps and cuddly battles.

The ARPG combat is a disappointment, though. When you're asked to take the fight to the enemy, on your own, you just dash in amongst them, do windmills until you're nearly out of health, and then go round a corner until your hitpoints have recharged. Enemies - when they're not waves crashing against your defences, or on looping patrol - will always leave you alone once you retreat a certain distance, and are generally slow enough that it's possible to simply run around in the middle of them without incurring any damage. For the most part these sections are the wrong kind of repetitive slog.

The limitations of the AI also extend back to the core of the game. It's fine that the clockwork attack patterns are predictable, because it gives you visual cues to where you'll need to repair in the next few seconds and gives you ideas for the next level's strategy. But when the clockwork forces manage to bust a platoon-shaped hole in your wall, they show no interest in marching through it - they just pound an adjacent bit of wall. Eventually they go through, and try and claim your source well, but even halfway through the game's many hours of campaign you're never left hanging on as the timer runs down, because the enemy just doesn't bother to act on its success.

Multiplayer might make up for that. Ostensibly the same as the single-player build-and-battle levels, the difference is that you spend some of your resources buying up an army of clockwork warriors to send off to fight the enemy. Alas though, Lock's Quest is offline-only and requires two copies of the game to play, and we've only got one, so we can't tell you if it does or doesn't atone for problems elsewhere.

The RPG story sections are reasonable, but there's little here we haven't seen or heard before, despite the occasional daft line. One villager says he'd help out "if it weren't for my gimped leg". Is that allowed?

Fortunately, it doesn't really matter in the long run, because despite its flaws - and a few niggles with the controls and camera - the core build and repair gameplay is very compelling. Most of the game is a pushover, but the frantic routine of building a defensive wall, laying out traps, and then dashing around ratcheting repairs on multiple fronts as red blips on the mini-map march towards your defences from different angles, is bafflingly compelling. Each build-and-battle level takes up a day of in-game time, and you often face increasingly hefty armies on the same battlefield several times over before you move on, but it's all too easy to tell yourself you'll do another five days before bed and end up doing the next 20 instead.