It’s strange to think of tower defense games as being a retro concept. Of course, depending on how strictly you define the phrase tower defense, they were there from the beginning. Defender, for example. But usually, when we say tower defense today, we’re referring to games from the early cell phone era, where you build little towers as enemies move in slow or fast motion in a line, and those towers do their best to shoot the enemy down. They were a decent fit for the limited hardware and dubious control interfaces at the time. But there was not, strictly speaking, any technical reason tower defense games had to be cell phone games. Which was how John Roo came to make Collie Defense.
A graduate of GBA Game Jam 2022, Collie Defense finished its successful Kickstarter campaign last year and is currently available for purchase on the Retro Room Games website. If you click through, you’ll find that the current asking price is fifty bucks…which is, frankly speaking, a bit much for a game so simple. Frankly speaking, the main thing Collie Defense has going for it is the novelty of it working on the Game Boy Advance hardware to begin with. If you’ve ever played one tower defense game, you’ve probably played Collie Defense. I’m loathe to even describe the mechanics in very much detail, since a big part of the fun of these games is trying to figure out the balance yourself based on fairly limited cues.
The collie you presumably play as, and the sheep you’re protecting, don’t really factor into the mechanics at all, even if they are reasonably cute in those big, chunky Game Boy Advance sprites. This does make shooting down those cute animals a little awkward, but that’s unavoidable. Collie Defense is really more about the arcade experience than anything else- just trying to set up price efficient defense perimeters enough that you’ll have enough money left over to craft a sufficiently efficient defense for the next level.
The fact that you don’t really have to pay attention to Collie Defense once you’ve set those defenses up is one reason why this whole tower defense genre of gameplay only became popular in the early cell phone era. It’s a game for multitasking, not one that demands your undivided attention. Which has the unfortunate effect of making Collie Defense not feel like a great Game Boy Advance game, specifically. Unlike Elland: The Crystal Wars, I can’t confidently say there’s enough meat to this game to justify the price point, if only because there’s very little about it to really discuss.
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