Iron Serpent Screenshot

One of the largest and most specific genres in the free game world is the tower defense game. I’m generally a big fan of the tower defense genre, and there are some great examples of classic tower defense games available online to play for free. For some reason, most of the great examples of tower defense games are free and online. I’ll be sharing many of them with you. And also, obviously, are the bad examples. I’ll be sharing some of those with you too.

Iron Serpent Defense is not so much “bad” as it is “mediocre” or “vanilla”. The graphics are decent, and it adheres fairly well to the tower defense genre’s standards. The concept of buying upgrades and close integration with virtual currency is also cool. If you’d like to play it, just check out the SWF below.

However, the game is still somewhat uninspired. There’s nothing that strongly differentiates this game from other free online tower defense games — except perhaps for the concept that towers can be damaged by creeps, which I consider to be a major flaw and completely unexplainable by the minimal storyline. I haven’t quite figured out how to prevent towers from being damaged by creeps, which I believe obviates the need for it to happen at all. It also greatly discourages investment in upgrades, which is a fairly important part of any TD game.

Finally, the differentiation of creeps — into Toxic, Air, Earth and Fire — is somewhat interesting, but still not incredibly inspired as far as tower defense games go. Why don’t “Air” creeps, for example, completely fly over the maze, as do “flying” creeps in Paul Preece’s Tower Defense? All the creeps just kind of clunk along at the same rate, waiting to be shot by cookie-cutter, quasi-futuristic towers.