Cake Pirate is a tower defense game in the style of Mushroom Revolution, where you add elements to your towers to make different power-up combinations, except this game has cake and pirates!
As you might expect, monsters travel along predetermined paths and you build towers along the sides to stop them. Your towers in this game are cakes, and you add extra ingredients like sugar, or peppermint to them that add various effects to them. Adding multiple ingredients will create recipes that give your cakes special bonuses, such as helping out other towers, shooting five targets at once, or even shooting bees. Yes, you can make a cake that shoots bees.
The twist here is that your lives are also cakes, and you can sell those cakes for money to upgrade your cake towers. Since you produce cakes throughout the level you will need to strike a balance between lives and cash. The concept is fairly straightforward but it does add an element of strategy to the game. In addition to lives and cash, skill points can be earned that you can use to help you out during the levels similar to Gemcraft.
Analysis: This is a pretty standard tower defense game, but that doesn't mean it should go overlooked. The visuals are great, the cakes look good enough to eat, and the interface is simple and clean. The music is excellent at setting a light and airy mood, I found it hard to get past the title screen just because I loved the song so much. The ability to sell your lives for cash is a welcome strategic addition. The enemies are a little bland here, though. You've got your basic ground (or sea in this case), and air monsters that don't really vary much. The game is also fairly difficult, but there is a free practice mode where you can hone your skills and get used to the different tower types.
But this is a game about cake and pirates! And it has a cake that shoots bees!!
Not impressed.
TD games come in 3 flavors:
-ones where the best strategy is to completely upgrade a single tower before building any others /lame
-ones where the best strategy is to fill the screen with un-upgraded towers before upgrading any /lame
-ones that have a balance /yay!
This one falls more into the first category, i.e.: "spam with weak towers to survive." But that's not all! The range-circles of the towers are not centered on the base of the tower, so you'll want to build all towers on one side of the paths or they won't hit anything. The upgrades are weak and far too expensive. The speed increases don't seem to effect the tower build speed. And where's the RESTART button? Do I really have to go back to the map and reselect the level to start over? And why is the space key used to deselect towers/units and not the ESC key?
This looks polished, and it's whimsical and quirky, which I imagine is why it's featured here, but not enough thought went into what's underneath and, ultimately, I want those 30 minutes of my life back.
SUPER MARIO RPG MUSIC STOLE!!!
Anyone besides me enough of a Mario fan to notice? The title screen doesn't even attempt to hide it either, it just the straight song. >.>
NOOOO!! I hate having to move the map around. I wish the whole thing was visible at once. And No restart button? Are you kidding me? Mad annoying, yo.
Could be a nice game, but the clumsy controls turn it into a rather frustrating experience. : (
Cae, yeah, I totally recognized the music. One of my fav songs from Super Mario RPG... I think I need to go download a ROM of it or something. Such a good game.
Great game of the face of it. Don't make the mistake I did and not even notice that you have a "skills" tree to put points into! Doh! Didn't realize that for a while.
Bob is right, it does pay to spam basic towers. But beyond that, once you've saturated all the "ideal" placement spots, upgrading becomes crucial.
Bob is also right about the "centering" issue, you are severely penalized by trying to have towers shoot "down" vs. "up" on the screen. Not the same reach.
I made it all the way to the third mission, had fun, and then hit a major problem. Two MAJOR problems with that last level:
1. Don't lose a single life? That's a lame rule, it takes away the elasticity of possible outcomes and punishes you with a single mistakes by making you replay the level! No Tower Defense should have that as a "challenge," IMHO.
2. It is possible that "boss" units on certain waves will come out of the SAME spawn point. It's much, much, much, much harder when this happens for obvious reasons. But it is random! So you basically have a "random" chance of losing the mission. VERY lame, and needs to be fixed. So yeah, I made it to level 30 after many attempts and the second off the two "boss" octopi broke through.
Hints:
Placement is everything. Use nothing but mix towers where they can reach two paths at once, use the others when they will only be attacking "up."
"Powerups" are awesome if you can group 3-4 towers around it to take advantage. Make sure they are "mix" towers so you get the bonus for both types of enemies!
Level 3 upgrades are not so hot, but you really don't get to use them if you are spamming towers anyway.
I got to wave 30 on mission 15 by clustering "power up" towers in four places.
Thank you guys for all your comments and feedback, it realy help us to make a better game.
I'm actually enjoying playing this one. I'm not a TD connoisseur, but the controls seem adequately intuitive. I do think that only having one zoom level that isn't the entire field is annoying, and there are some other UI things that could have been done better (like always show the monsters out/monsters to go counter, as it's a crucial part of my strategy, and maybe be more detailed about what the different skill upgrades do, and making the skill upgrade part of the game more noticeable), but overall I'm having fun playing through the levels.
Here's my strategy so far. I'm only about halfway through all the levels as far as I can tell.
Use mix towers as often as possible. Start with one near the spawn point and try to get it upgraded once and with green + white elements, which is the +4% reload speed each time it fires. This way, since it's near the spawn point, you can send the next wave as soon as the monsters from the current one are out of range, thus preventing the tower from resetting back to a slow reload speed. It seems the fastest that a mix tower can get is 13.
I usually bolster that tower with a splasher nearby (just a mix tower with one green element) because enemies are generally more clustered at the beginning.
It would probably help to use the damage-enhancing power and any number of other helper towers to increase the power of the main mix tower that fires fast, but I haven't tried that yet.
I also sell off some cake at the beginning for some extra cash, but never let it go below 15 intentionally.
Anybody have some tips for level 10? It's getting really annoying.
Well, I cleared to level 15 and gave up when two snail bosses went down the short side. Just...no.
This game is fun until you realize the severe bugs in the game.
None of the AOE abilities grant you cash from a multi-kill. None of them. The Roast tower is just awesome for early game but...it doesn't give you any cash. Period. Neither does the pure earth aoe...spore tower...etc. None of them give money from the aoe-kill. Original kill, yeah, but that's only the 1 kill. As an example:
I have killed every enemy in level 4 up to the final (flying) boss with a single sea-roast tower at the very beginning. Then I got owned because I couldn't kill the final boss, because I didn't have any money.
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