Miniclip's Canyon Defense is another tower defense game—I know, I know—but this one has good pixel art and does things a little bit differently. First of all, there are no upgrades. That's the genre's equivalent of Marcel Duchamp putting a urinal in an art museum. Or is it? What if I told you this heresy against form also has time-based special abilities? And support buildings?
The interface is the usual: Click on a building to select it, click on a non-path part of the map to build it. Building costs money, and you can sell them, too. This time there are tabs for basic towers, advanced towers, and buildings. Unlocking the towers and buildings involves completing "quests" like building a required number of towers, or saving up a required amount of money; there are also requirements that the towers above the one you want in the menu are also unlocked. Placement is critical, as your towers must turn to target the enemies. Buildings provide the ability to launch a nuclear strike, place walls, or freeze time, all with a long cool-down period between each use, and some buildings also give passive benefits, or "buffs" (to you WoW veterans).
Analysis: The game works despite its departure from the conventional mechanics of the tower defense genre; however, the game is also similar to its cousins in one major respect: it suffers for severe tuning issues. The speed of the projectiles is just as fast as the fastest enemy unit, meaning that your missiles can chase the bugger in a straight line, right off the screen. Coupled with the painfully slow turning speed of the turrets, a property common to every tower, and you've got a game whose basic mechanic hinges on something badly in need of oiling. Then you've got the upgrade tree's highly inelegant structure, hanging like a sickly willow on way too many dependencies to intuitively make a strategy out of. It's not too late MiniClip, tune that spreadsheet! The support building sub-system does add an interesting tactical level to the genre.
If you want some fresh TD with a Mad Max aesthetic, play 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
When you get those mean-last-level auto repairs, then buy and sell your nclear silo. You have to be FAST though. And your anti-air should be built in a triangular shape to blow up more plains.
I love this game,too.mostly because my 6 yo nephew likes to play it with me & I can let him play it while I do other things & come back.he's starting to pick up the strategy part of the game & it's fun to watch.
i completed it on hard mode but after lv 50 it stops, does it on yours? and i only got 184000 how do you get really high scores
(miniclip name jd inator)
Does anyone know how to stack turrets and buildings? I covered the entire map with turrets and buildings, but I can't stack. How do you guys do it? Please post ASAP.
I have played this game on both PC and MAC with various web browsers. Safari on the mac seems to allow building certain towers on top of each other (but not all) EG: build a tesla on the ground and build a gauss cannon on top of it, if however I am playing in windows with IE6, I cannot place tower on top of eachother at all, ii think it' a bug.
I love this game!
I've been using Miniclip for a whie now, and this is my new favourite!
Few tips for them who are stuck - without having to stack, you can on the 3rd map, place plenty of buildings. The first map a few and the 2nd map very few - hence I feel Map 2 is the hardest!
Always play on Hard - the enemies die the same, but the game goes on for longer.
Recycle, recycle, recycle - this is what all the space is for. Then you can just upgrade your guns until you have a full blown strobe effect as a dozen Gauss guns go off on some poor unsuspepcting tank...
And Miniclip/developers? PLEASE release a sequel!
I hope if thay make a second Canyon Defense, that they will install custom and sandbox modes. Also it would be neat to have an Anti TD for this one too. In Anti TD you release the critters and Mr. Cheater, oh I'm sorry I meant Mr. Computer, will destroy them. I beat a trillion times, now it's your turn. Ciow.
I upgraded the flash player to version 10 and then I could stack buildings and having lots and lots of recyclers and lots and lots of points. I came back to version 9.
i sent them this email, let me see what the answer with. for those of you who want to play and get the highest score, i would not reccommend that. it changes the game and slows it down.....alot, even with a good system.
Dear Flashgamesite,
Thank you for providing free games online. My favourite is Canyon Defense. I like it because you can kill everything while killing time.
Until about 4 days ago everything was great. Then some weird things began to happen and continue to do so. I thought that this might must be a glitch in your system and would correct itself in a matter of days. It appears as though this malfunction occurs
only with Canyon Defense and happens regardless of which website I play from and only from my home computer.
The game malfunctions are as follows:
- Instead of having a hand-cursor to select objects, my normal mouse cursor appears instead.
- The weapon systems are no longer visible as drag-and-drop objects, but their radiuses are.
- Buildings and weapons can repeatedly be placed atop one another and on pathways.
- Some buildings appear when placing and do not.
- I can only sell missile turrets.
- I can score a gagillion billion zillion points; more than Bill Gates could.
In some ways, it's as if I'm playing the game as though I were a programmer and I don't know the first thing about that. I had made no changes to my system settings previously. I had the latest in flash players and Active-X as required by most common internet games. Since then, I have updated just about everything including the latest IE Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, my mouse and keyboard
software, my virus and spyware programs and have ran a complete system scan for viruses, spyware, and other evil spirits. Despite this, I continue to experience this problem. I'm beginning to feel as if your game just flat-out doesn't like me. Is there an additional software update I should be made aware of? Or is this something that just needs to be clicked the right way on the right button somewhere? I've tried using my Control Panel, Logitech Set-Point settings and searching Google until I was blue in the face. I've tried to do everything except
To write an email to someone and ask for help.
So if you have any ideas, I'd warmly welcome them. The game is a lot more fun when you can play it as it was designed. Cheating is cool for scoreboards, but those aren't my thing.
7 million is easy enough, i normally, if after a big score only place turrets on 3 squares and have about 8 goo machines. Make sure you get what seems like millions of recyclers and loads of radar bases
andy_scouser
Heres something to help. You can put most things on the map. You cannot put missle turrets, but things such as AA guns and alot of buildings are able to go on the actual map that the enemies come down. This helps alot, i just figured it out when playing on med. Good luck and hope i helped!
Well, if you want to know how to stack, click my spoiler. after enjoying the game as much as possible, i tried this. still in the middle of my game, but its actually really funny to watch your money go through the ceiling!
simply download google chrome!
Dr_Derogatory, your hints were the most useful of all. I used to struggle with the game, sometimes making it by a hair's breadth only. Not anymore. Now the havoc I wreak is flat-out ridiculous.
So, thanks.
As for tweaking the game, I wouldn't change much. It's fine and cute as is. The only "gripe" I have is its lack of life-likeness:
1) in real life, no ground vehicle could outrun a missile. So, either make the missiles faster, or the fastest vehicles slower.
2) also, vehicles should not and cannot overlap each other.
3) AA guns need to rotate faster. If real-life AA guns were this slow, warfare would be impossible. The other weapons pretty much rotate at a realistic speed.
4) the howitzer is pretty much useless. Its projectiles fly like it's the 19th century. They need to fly faster.
Otherwise: a cute little well-thought-out game that makes working hours a lot more bearable. Rock on!
HIGHSCORE GLITCH EXPLAINED.
Firstly, I use Firefox and I'm not certain of which browsers this happens on but it appears to be caused by the pop-up or overlay filters or something. When to click on a purchase it will not "drag" asross the screen as it is supposed to, it will just remain a cursor. When this happens, you can place that unit anywhere on the grid it can be stacked. They appear to hang above the map when placed. You can still build walls and place other units on them as usual. They don't impede the enemy. If this happens with Recyclers, build As many as you can. Build 10 or more Radars to really power up your guns!
My best score is about 20,000,000 points.
NOTE: What can be stacked appears to vary from game to game, just watch the cursor.
JAMUS47.
I could not find time to read all the comments but aftger 30 minutes I wanted to leave a couple comments...
one on the game design... I have no problems except that the high score is nearly useless due to all the people using money cheats. The game should not allow saving of the score if the person had any money before the first enemy was killed. These guys start with $29,000,000 and buy whatever they want and end up with a high score (can they really enjoy this?)
one on the game play... the glitch allowing the placement of items on top of one another (or in the middle of roadways without walls) is a browser issue. I know for sure that you can do these things running Opera, and not with Explorer.
Thanks,
Shayne
quick tip
you can build some towers and buildings on top of eachother this will help in middle map.
I love this game as it is a great time waster instead of doing the work I should be engaged in!
Always wondered how on earth people ended up getting 38 million when the best I could do was 300,000. Now I know!
Hope there is a sequal. If anyone is interested, there is a great varient on miniclip called viking defense. Similar game designed by the same people and just as enjoyable.
I'm sort of a new player, and i get the basics, but since the instruction just show up as 00000000000, i dont know how to shoot the air units. can someone please tell me how?
Great game - pity there is no 'interest' bonus which would encourage you to be economical. Most hints are shown above:
Forget the Howitzer and the Teslas - they do not offer value for money
In the easy game you can progress remarkably far with 3 standard turrets and one AA gun. The 1st turret should go in the middle of the area on the left.
The key to getting high scores is the recycler - when you have 3 multi-shot guns they can cope with a lot of the levels especially together
The neutraliser will remove speed/ autorepair - have some early on in the path and spread them out so they don't all target the same object
When placing goo guns try and set them close to the outer limit of the AA guns. This means that the AA guns are probably best slightly further up the screen i.e. the higher of the lower area.
*
For the first canyon, my high score is 460,000 and saving all 10 lives without stacking.
The game can be won as follows:
- Getting started select missile and arrange a triangle defense pattern in a tight pattern to allow cross fire. This should be in the front of the canyon just in front and to the left of the entry. This way if an enemy gets past the first salvo, you have another chance as they come back around the canyon. Keep adding missiles as need but try to conserve cash to allow you to purchase other needed items.
- For the first air attack, allow the plain to enter screen and place only one air defense in that row - in line with the plain, about ¾ of the way back (near the BACK but NOT the back row). This way you only have to purchase one air defense on this turn and conserve your cash. By now you may be able to buy the Nuc, or close to it.
- Build a Nuc as fast as you can first
- Conserve 4-squares land and hold that for buildings where you place new buildings to make extra blocks of 4-sqaures
- Build the wall factory so you can create / build additional ground. You will ultimately need to build two total wall factories to get the research building.
- IMPORTANT. Build Recycling plant (or 2,3,4…) AS FAST AS YOU CAN as they provide you CASH quickly to purchase other needed items. THIS IS KEY !
- Build radar dome (or 2,3,4…) to increase the power and range of defense weapons. You can get by with fewer missile and guns just by having stronger weapons that can then shoot further and harder and add a few goo guns at strategic places to slow down air and ground enemy at concentrated fire power areas that will provide the most punch.
- The research building will give you three key items. 1 is the nullifier that brings down the shields and auto repair feature of the enemy. 2 is the gauss canon. 3 is the time stop that out found useful at first but the more you play and the more radars you build, you will not end up sing this any longer,
PS.the howitzer is pretty much useless.
That that you know... have fun!
*
*
*
goo+howtizer=pwn as goo slows them and the howt 1hit kills a tiny with OVERKILL range and splash to boot as it can murder like that also the howt is for auto regeners (4 of em that got goo backup slings hell at teh land and the goo helps with AA 2
Hi I am new to games. Just retired to I am a little OLD but trying to lean new games. Love Cayon Denfense BUT neet to know how to work the items under buildings. Any help will be appreciated. Old dogs can lean new tricks. Thank
hi, anyone knows how to destroy JAMMERS?
Please Help!
> hi, anyone know how to destroy JAMMERS?
REPLY:
Put a whole lot of stun towers in the distance... The jamming effect can't reach the stun tower... If you have no money, sell the gun which is jammed earlier...
In the information era, people’s life is filled with hustles and bustles. Sometimes we just want a quiet environment to enjoy ourselves. Then you may need this remote jamming which can be got from jammerfromchina.com masking for acoustic interference against listening devices.
Hi there guys, wanted to share with all of you that Canyon Defense is my favorite tower defense game. This is a nice review of the game which i shared with some of my friends however they told me that they are not able to play this game at their schools. For some reason your website is blocked in all of the schools in my city. Please try to fix that because they are heading to Canyon Defense - Unblocked Games Room to play the game.
Update