Line of Defense: Tactics
Let’s not beat around the bush – Line of Defense: Tactics has some serious problems. It’s graphically weak, the story manages to be generic and confusing at the same time, and actually attempting to play it feels like trying to tie six sets of shoelaces all at once. Pretty much the only thing it has going for it is that there isn’t much in the mobile space to compete with it right now. Sadly for me, I played it on the desktop, so I didn’t even have that going for me.
When Charles asked me if I wanted to check out a review copy of LoD:T, I took a look at some of the screenshots and videos and said “What the hell, I’ll give it a shot.” I thought the game looked like it borrowed heavily from Starcraft, and I enjoyed the hell out of that (like basically everyone else). Turns out, it’s not at all like Starcraft, not even the combat portions. Line of Defense: Tactics is a real-time action tactical combat game.
If I’d known that it was at its heart a squad combat game, I probably would have passed. Squad based combat games have never really been my thing, no matter what genre they fall 
into. I didn’t care for Bros of War, I’m not a big RTS guy, and most turn based tactical games bore me to tears. The notable exception is the game that LoD specifically reminded me of: XCom. Sadly, the strengths I found in XCom were specifically the weaknesses I found in Line of Defense.
XCom makes me feel like I bounce back and forth from playing a squad in Aliens to being in the situation room on The West Wing. Line of Defense makes me feel like I’m playing a game in the late 90’s that I don’t quite have enough RAM for, no matter how many times I push the Turbo button on my tower.
The first thing I noticed when I started up the game was that I had no idea what was going on. I launched the first mission and was greeted by a stilted voice-over about some of the mission specifics. I gather there was an opening bit of voice-acting during the splash animations that explained the universe a bit, but that didn’t play for me for some reason. I was just suddenly swimming in universe specific acronyms and told that I hated some kind of Insurgency. It wasn’t so overwhelming that it drove me away, because the story was generic enough that it was easy to spot the sci-fi good guy and sci-fi bad guy, but it was certainly off-putting. I felt like there was some kind of expectation that I would intrinsically understand what was going on. The game IS a spin-off of an MMO, but not an MMO I would call a breakout success in the genre. There are a few games that can get away with as little intro as I was presented in LoD:T, and those games come with names like Diablo and Fallout.
The next thing I noticed was that the graphics are kind of terrible. They’re not laughably bad, but they’re not exactly top of the line. There really isn’t anything creative going on in the artistic design of the game. There are generic space combat mans fighting other generic space combat mans, and occasionally blowing up a box or two. The ships looks better, once you reach them, but it still looks a bit like a well-polished senior project from a game design school.
The actual game play is a lot like the XCom combat missions in design. You (try to) move your mans from cover point to cover point while getting the drop on enemy patrols and fulfilling the mission objectives. Between each mission you can spend the experience you earn to unlock new abilities for each member of your squad, such as using sniper rifles or being able to use med packs to heal. This theoretically allows you to shape each squad member to have specific strengths and weaknesses, so that if you use them all well you can blow through the missions with ease. All in all, not a bad design, if nothing new. The design is pretty much where the similarities end, however.
The control scheme is awful. The game is a mobile port, and the interface is clearly designed for mobile devices with absolutely no change for a desktop. That sucks on a desktop game, where the way I interact with what’s going on is completely different. Clicking behind one soldier and dragging in a straight line to move my people isn’t that effective when 3 soldiers burst out of a door and start hosing me with gunfire. The game also drops what is a completely standard interface for basically all desktop games – the ability to click a point and drag to select multiple units. That just doesn’t exist. This makes the real-time nature of the game a serious problem. I just couldn’t react quickly when I needed to. The game does support “pausing”, but that’s basically just freezing the game while you hold the mouse button down trying to select an action for one of your mans. Spacebar, much like the goggles, does nothing, unlike in Balder’s Gate or virtually every other game that uses real time combat but isn’t action oriented.
The real time nature wouldn’t be as bad if the AI for your squad wasn’t laughably bad. I would regularly select an enemy and tell all of my d00ds to attack him. Instead of using their futuristic laser rifles to gun the bad guy down, they’d sometimes run up to him and his three friends, whereupon one of my guys would start punching, while the others stood around with arms folded and watched their pal get a serious beatdown. It was like getting into a bar fight with the cast of this season’s Survivor and it was time to vote someone off the island. The only scenarios I lost were when my soldiers decided that they didn’t care for the orders I gave them and did something else instead. The enemies never seemed to have much of a problem murdering MY guys, however. Given that the game guides you to make each of your squad members specialized, this clunky AI is incredibly frustrating. When you need a squad member who can pilot a specific type of vehicle, and the first thing that member does is declare that they’d like pepperoni on their Tombstone, the rest of the mission is a waste of time.
Somehow, despite all of this, I actually did find the game kind of fun. Again, it pushes a few of the same buttons as XCom, just not nearly as well. I liked running my guys into a room and having them wait for a patrol to walk past, then opening fire. I also enjoyed the tiny stealth element the game has, where your squad can sneak up behind stationary enemies and whack them over the head to take them out. The combination of squad based missions and vehicle missions makes the game serve as a bit of a stepping stone toward a more full version of the tactical game we all want to play – the game with many frames of reference that are all done well. Civilization plus XCom plus Xwing plus Alien Swarm plus Final Fantasy Tactics – the game that does every aspect of a space war and does it well. So, while my review was originally going to be harsh, I found enough that I liked that I was going to recommend people give the game a shot. At least, until I looked at the price.
The price tag on this sumbitch was the final nail in the coffin for me. Line of Defense: Tactics uses an old Shareware style pricing model – the first three levels are free, and then you pay to unlock the rest. On the mobile version of the game, you pay five bucks to play the other 13 missions. That’s not an unreasonable price, especially when tactical squad based games are pretty lean in the mobile market right now. On the PC, however, they are charging a whopping 25 bucks to unlock the rest of the game. A game which, to my eyes at least, has gotten NO upgrades from the mobile version. When I look at the quality of the desktop version plus the pricing, it seems to me like a poor attempt to put 20 hours of work into slapping the game onto Steam and then hoping more than 30 people buy it so you can make a little extra scratch. In other words, a work of greed and not of love. I definitely don’t object to people in the games industry making money – I want them to make MORE money. I just want them to make money because they’ve invested themselves in a game, and I like to see passion and artistic drive rewarded. Not “Oh shit, look how easy this is to drop onto steam, I bet at least a hundred people will buy it!”
So, I guess if you’re hard-up for a squad based game, and want to play it on a mobile platform, give the first three levels of Line of Defense: Tactics a try. But if you’re on a desktop, stay far away. Just load up XCom instead.
