Canyon Defense

Another minor problem is that, when you start a map, there's no obvious way of telling which direction the enemies will come from. I had to abandon my first attempt because I put all my turrets in the wrong place; they were so out of position that they couldn't take down more than one unit per wave.

A truly dadaist tower defense game would involve tearing down your towers. And the enemies, who for some reason poke in funny European accents, would actually be healing you, and your goal would be to kill yourself with the falling tower rubble.

Thank heavens I'm not a game designer.

Replay value isn't that high as the game doesn't take much strategy. One of the things that really bothered me was that after destroying a target, the missiles don't target another enemy and ends up not doing anything. Also, playing in Hard, you will need more room to build buildings on and I often found myself building on my own walls. Other than that, good find, but rather easy.

Hey - thanks for the review. Canyon Defense (note the lack of "tower" in the name) was Miniclips (lower case c) first tower defense game, and we were really pleased with how it turned out.

The direction of the enemies is something we should have considered... not sure how we missed that one. The other comments you have? I can only say we wanted to do something slightly different to the normal tower defense game. We've been really pleased with the reception the game has had and will likely consider making a sequel, and we'll certainly address any issues people had in that.

Wow... That was short!

Ok, the middle map is useless. You can only build 4 buildings which then restricts your turrets as well. Avoid!

LazyPint:

you can build on walls, (provided by the wall factory), which makes it possible to expand your building area and provide space for more than four buildings.

ben, it's good to see that Miniclip does monitor various sites for comments and takes them into consideration to improve a game in the future.

I really enjoyed working through the "quest" tree to get better units, kind of like a call back to command and conquer. All of the new ingredients to tower defense games worked GREAT, but agree that there are some minor flaws, as mentioned by the reviewer.

I'm really excited to see a second canyon defense, and hopefully more tower defense games from Miniclip!

The 50% pay towers being as cheap and early as they are makes this game disappointingly easy, even if I had a lot of fun proving that.

I found it way too easy. At the end game, I built a bunch of recyclers and it got to the point where each kill was giving me three to four thousand gold each. Additionally, I'm not sure if it's a bug or not, but I could build multiple towers of the same type on the same square of land, so space wasn't a problem for me.

Still I enjoy TDs, and it was a good way for me to spend about an hour.

:o I like this game a lot! It's one of the few TD games that keeps my attention.

"and some buildings also give passive benefits, or "buffs" (to you WoW veterans)."

Why does the world revolve around World of Warcraft these days? I can personally attest to the fact that the term "buff", meaning a passive power-up, dates back to the days when online games didn't even have graphics, back in the glory days of text-based MUDs.

The new concepts are nice, but I agree the implementation wasn't as good as it probably could have been.

I was able to build towers on top of each other, too. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but it was a pretty interesting thing.

Interesting game but it could do with a few tweaks.

I found it frustrating that there was no button to speed up gameplay. A FF button would be nice as the creeps are rather slow.

The Challenges are a nice touch.

It's tricky working out how many of a defence type there are on the screen as the Towers don't correspond to the pictures of them. That makes it particularly difficult to ensure a spread of Towers as they all look the same. Maybe using different colours would be better.

A tiny thing, but I love watching my enemy's health drop. It's nice to click on them and see how many health points they still have.

I loved this game! I'm a lover of TD games.

Two main things that this game needs in a sequel:

1) An unlimited levels mode.

2) A sandbox mode.

These would raise the replay value by a lot for me.

Dead Star: I hear you man, I just didn't think reffing Diku on a casual games site was worth doing, you know?

I found Lizard's post to be quite interesting, as well as this game. The graphics aren't bad, either.

General Brokenness:

After there are enough objects on the screen, you can stack buildings, at which point the game is very easy. This happens pretty early in the game.

Once you can build the Recycler, just stack as many of those as you can while maintaining defences. The amount of money you're making will increase exponentially, so you'll soon have far more money than you'd ever really need. Once you can build the armour piercing guns and the chaingun, a few stacks of maybe 10 or 20 of those will be all you'll need, and you can focus on building heaps of Recyclers for the score increases.

It's nice to see things done differently now and then. This game is fun, and a lot easier to get into than some tower defense games. It helps that the towers are unlocked gradually, giving you only the bare essentials to start with so you aren't inundated with unnecessary or inappropriate towers to begin with; and the game leniently introduces you to each new enemy, meaning you aren't forced to immediately learn all the enemies' traits the first time you meet each type of enemy.

I also like how the enemy vehicles move about erratically, especially when the fast ones crash into walls and get stuck momentarily so I get an extra chance to explode them.

I noticed quite a few Command & Conquer similarities, actually. It looks like some inspiration was taken from it for some things.

Please jay... I think we DO need more TD games!

This one is great exept for the few faults mentioned above... I dont like the quest unlocking thing, TD games are not supposed be have a `story` line previously written for you. Its supposed to be the strategy of knowing which towers to use, to let us have more combinations. And in this game the air part can be excluded it is too easy to be a challenge but only a little annoying to put a few extra air towers in

But love the buildings and bonus powers.

A (horrible) problem I found with certain enemies.

Auto-repair units are impossible for me to destroy, that even a missile couldn't help, they heal too fast. Does Anyone else have this problem?

Few things to fix:

Enemies don't give enough money. The game ends before you can gather enough cash to build things.

Not enough spaced to build big buildings that take 4 squares.

Missiles don't acquire new targets.

Before I spend the money to do a challenge to unlock a tower... I'd like to know what that tower does.

Tiny speeders... fast as my missles? ;~;

There's potential here. Needs moar work.

"Dead Star: I hear you man, I just didn't think reffing Diku on a casual games site was worth doing, you know?"

I don't disagree, I just think it's a terrible shame. Having worked on / helped build multiple MUDs, including one on Diku, I'm always a little sad to see the Internet described in terms of World of Warcraft as the launch point.

Example: The other day, I actually saw someone try to claim that the term "pwn" was coined by the WoW dev team.

Don't get me wrong -- I have nothing against World of Warcraft. I just think the 90's need a little respect.

What I want to know is how are people scoring in the millions. I mean, clearly it's possible; I just don't understand how.

How are you stacking buildings? I've had every spot possible on the screen, including walls, built with either building or turret, and i can't stack anything.

i love canyon defense so much!!! There's just one thing I can't beat med mode i get to wave 37 or 36. Does anyone have any tips or cheats that will help? thanks.

Love this! My middle aged brain welcomes the fact that you can delay placing (eg) the Air Turret until you see where the planes are coming from, and you can place additional turrets during an attack.
Love the oil slick!
To kill autorepair enemies

lots of turrets grouped together works, with the one that slows them

so does the one that hits 3 at a time

bba:

The only hints or tips I can give you are as listed below. I've never posted to this site, so forgive me if this doesn't come out right.

Tip 1: Every time you build something, it will regenerate the ability. For example: you build a wall factory, and when you do, the ability to build a wall appears and you can build the wall instantly. So if you sell the property and then build another wall factory, you can automatically build another wall. This works for the nukes as well.

Tip 2: Build as many recyclers as possible, that is the key to the largest bank.

Tip 3: At the very end of the round, say, round 45 or so, cash in all of your recyclers and build radar domes in their place. This will give every single tower a range of the entire map. For example, a Gutling Laser at the back of the map can hit an enemy just coming out of the gate. I also noticed that after I used this trick, the next time I played (Immediately after because I'm a dork like that) my damage was increased three fold. Tiny enemies will go down with one shot from a missle turret.

okay, well that is all I can really offer. I also cannot get the towers or buildings to stack, so if anyone has a suggestion on how to get that done, I'd be happy to see it. Hope my tips help those trying to beat it without stacking anything. My best score is around 500,000 points. Have fun, I love this game.

Peace,
Doc

From what I've gathered (from places other than here, since nobody here seems to know, or at least willing to comment) the stacking of buildings is due to a glitch in some (non PC?) browsers, which some players have taken great advantage of to get their uber-high scores. This makes me much more satisfied with my scores in the 400,000-500,000 range.

Stacking is certainly a bug, but I doubt it's a browser bug. It could possibly be a bug in Flash (in my case that would be the latest flash player for Linux). More likely though, it's just a bug in the game. The ability to stack things is a bit sporadic, but it happens most often when there are a lot of sprites on the screen and the game has slowed down a touch as a result. Once you've stacked enough things, you can pretty much do it consistently. There could be some kind of strange race condition on doing the check to see whether the placement is valid.

The only problem I have with this game is that it doesn't go on for longer!

dont like the fact that units can occupy the same space.
makes it darn near impossible to tell who took what damage, and gives the enemy unfair advantage in that they bunch up and my guns only target the first one...

Maybe I am to old for games but I enjoy Canyon Defense. I just can't get past level 28 to save my life.

What map do you think is the best? I like the first...

I can't get it to stack, and am curious how people keep getting -1 scores? the highest i've gotten was like 100000

LOVE this game, thanks to all those who left some hints, I didn't know about stacking or selling, no wonder my score was rubbish!? :) Plz Plz Plz Canyon DefenseII
Brancher888

Main Strategies
- Identify lots of 4-squares land and hold that for buildings

- Identify wher you can place new buildings to make extra blocks of 4-sqaures

- ...then try to get as many Recyclers as you can !! They make you loads of money to buy more Recyclers and radar positions.... then you can sacrifice some of your lower spec guns for fewer higher spec ones that can then shoot further and harder (when you have several Radar towers)

- Place several Radar towers to increase the strength of all weapons ranges and hit power

- Get 3+ tesla’s quickly (sell and swap positions for your anti-ground cannons)

- place several Goo Cannons at strategic places to slow down the “Uber fast vehicles”

Nice game.

Recyclers are the key. Get as many as you can as fast as you can.

The ultmiate tower is the Nucularfactor it turns off shelds. If you have enough you don't need any oil sprayes to trap hard to kill emimeys.

I can get to the end wipe out all the enemies save all my lives but cant get anywhere near the uber high scores. I dont have the "clitch" in my internet browser. If I build the second wall factory it doesnt give me the chance to build another wall immediately. There is a definite ceiling to my score no matter what I do.

So, with the stacking glitch its possible to run scores up to the level of 12,568,256. Why, then, is the high score still at about 7 million? I think that the game will not accept scores above 7 million as a high score.

Anyone else notice this?

-elio

I think from a game play perspactive that game is outstanding. I played it at an internet Cafe down in Bondi - Australia.

It was fantastic.

Ok, thanks. Cya now bye

Paddy