With the development of 3,000 AD’s Line of Defense MMO taking longer than expected, the developers have released a squad based Real time strategy game called, Line of Defense Tactics. LOD Tactics was originally released on iOS and Android on February 4th for Android and February 5th for iOS.

Before playing Line of Defense Tactics I hadn’t really played that many top down perspective, but after playing this game I really don’t feel like trying any others. For me I found Line of Defense boring there wasn’t much for me to be interested in, for example I disliked Lightning Returns, but at least in had a visually impressive battle system. At €22.99, Line of Defense Tactics is a game to avoid.

There is next to nothing I enjoyed about this game. The friendly and enemy AI are pretty disappointing, friendly AI characters push their way against partners so they can walk to a location and when you select a location to defend the character decides to go to a different location.

Controls wise, LOD Tactics is strange because for troop movement there are two ways to move them. One is click and drag a soldier and the second is to click a soldier and click where you want to move him too. One issue I found about the controls (not including the above mentioned problem when defend option) is that the ability to select multiple units is limited. You have a move all or attack all, but you can’t for example pick two troops and move them as one unit, you have to do it one at a time. As you progress in the campaign you control a ship for a short amount of time and well using it feels terrible, the ship turns incredibly slowly, to turn it you have to click and drag, also the hands off nature of ship combat is weird because while you can fire auto lock missiles and a terrible forward facing cannon the ship has auto turrets that shoots everything down for you. Also, if you run out of ammo or lose too much health you can spend some combat points and get back all what you lost.

The game’s campaign is also suitably dull, what I could stomach of it was a that you control a four man team called Razor Team, and your mission is to stop a bunch of insurgence by recapturing a ship, capturing their space base, disabling its weapons and going down to their planet and capture their leaders. That is as much of the campaign story as I could understand.

Let’s move away from the negativity for a second and look at one of its positives and that is the game’s character progression. It isn’t amazing compared to other games, but it is the best feature of this game, which really isn’t saying much. To unlock new skills for each of your four squad members you have to use Combat Experience Points (CEP) these are gained through killing, gathering and completing a campaign mission. CEP is used to unlock new certificates for each character, thus making them more situational in combat (new weapons, abilities etc.) after that you also have to spend CEP on using what you unlocked either by buying a new weapon or item, although unlike the certificates buying a new weapon or item unlocked said object for all four characters.

Now back to the final negative, the options. My computer is pretty ancient (my graphics card is an Nvidia 9600 GT) and I had no problem running the game on maximum settings, with that said getting to the maximum graphical settings is a bit of a joke with the game offering three graphical options: fastest, good and best. That is the entirety of the graphical options. If you want to find additional graphical option or to change your screen resolution well you have to close the game and load the game while pressing down on the shift key. Once you get into this option you have a choice of six graphical quality options (no advanced options at all), the ability to change the resolution and the ability to change your key bindings. Honestly I don’t know why you have to exit the game just to change these options as they should be easily done within the game itself.

Conclusion

Should you buy Line of Defense Tactics? No

Line of Defense Tactics is a pretty boring PC game, with the game’s mobile past making for some lack lust controls and near non-existent options menu. For €22.99 on Steam I recommend avoiding Line of Defense Tactics.

Pros/Cons

+ Decent character progression/skill system

– Options menu is almost nonexistent
– Boring story
– Poor controls
– Overall poor port of a mobile game

For more information on Line of Defense Tactics, visit http://lodmmo.com/tactics/.