Review: Nintendo Wii Ware's Defend Your Castle

Of all the games I've tried for the Nintendo Wii's "Wii Ware," (the gaming system's downloadable game service) "Defend Your Castle" is the best value I've found so far. Of course, for $5, it's hard for a game not to deliver well enough to justify its own cost, but this little piece of Wii Ware does that and more.

The premise of this Wii game is simple: you are the king of a castle, and you must defend it from an ever-increasing onslaught of intruders who wish to break down the front gate and gain entry. But before I get into how this works, I'd like to talk a little about the graphics:

"Defend Your Castle" is very cleverly designed to look like it was built in an elementary school art class. The backdrop and castle are made to look as though they were cut out of construction paper and string (your castle will even develop a "crumpled" look as security weakens) while the attackers are nothing more than stick men made of what appears to be white buttons and pipe cleaners.

Like all Wii Ware, this game is designed to utilize the Wii remote and it's motion-sensing technology. In order to defend your castle, you simply hover your cursor (which takes the shape of a plastic bread bag clip) over one of the stick men and click to pick him up. You then kill him by tossing him high into the air with your Wii remote, letting him fall screaming to the ground where he's crushed.

Seem barbaric? Don't worry: any sympathy you might feel for these little guys is not going to last.

Once you get the hang of this aspect of the game, it starts to get tougher. They come faster and more frequently. They bring popsicle-stick battering rams (no, a popsicle stick isn't very powerful, but hey, your castle is made of construction paper), pop-gun explosives, and that's just the beginning. But never fear: for every enemy warrior you kill, you earn points, points which can be spent between levels on repairs and upgrades to your fortress, including the ability to build your own defensive army.

Ultimately, this becomes a game of long-term strategy. While you can save your progress at every level, you will find, once your fortress has succumb, that you want to start over from the very beginning and build a better defense system from square one. Meanwhile, the game supplies you with new and exciting enemies at every level that will make you want to keep trying.

I'm not sure, yet, how far this game goes or if it even has an ending. But after playing it for a week, I'm nowhere near sick of trying to find out. If Nintendo's Wii Ware can keep supplying us with games like this, they're sure to keep getting a fair amount of my pocket change.