In the simple and kid friendly Tree House Defense, created by Robert Zubek and Bill Robinson for Three Rings' Whirled, protect your tree house from bullies, skateboarders, skunks, and other assorted neighborhood menaces.
Place various objects like trash cans, sandboxes, and trees on the board to protect your flag. Each defense station comes with a kid, armed with weapons like paper airplanes, water balloons, and boomerangs. Each station has a point system for range, damage and delay, with different costs.
We're sorry, but this game is no longer available on the Whirled site.
Arrange these items in maze like patterns to get enough hits on your opponents before they reach your side. Each time you defeat enemies you get money to buy more objects. You continue placing objects on the board as the bullies get tougher. Your goal is to last as long as possible, and keep everyone away from your flag. You have four environments to pick from: forest, beach, winter, and Halloween, and each environment has a couple of unique assets to play with besides the standard ones on every board.
Analysis: If you find that some of the elaborate tower defense games are bit too eye glazing and forbidding to get into, then this cute and simple game is a great place to start. So, it's probably not for the seasoned tower defense veteran.
I liked the simple relatable idea of keeping the bullies at bay. The animations were cute, very Saturday morning cartoon-style. I especially liked the extras in each environment, like the Yeti and the huffing Jack-o-lantern. The gameplay feels a little slow at times, although I like that you can speed things up a bit by forcing out the next enemy on the board. I would have liked a fast forward feature. The other thing that bothered me a bit was that they used a flag as the home base instead of the tree house itself. On the plus side, there is a two player mode, and also some mention about making custom levels yourself in the future. Fight off the bullies in Tree House Defense!
FYI: the art was done by Bill Robinson, the programming by Robert Zubek, and the design was a collaboration between the two.
Thanks, MDB. I've updated the review.
Is it just me or is it taking a long time to load? Running Firefox 3.
This is a broken game without the ability to erase things. Can you really not do that? Or am I just an idiot?
But so far, it's a cool idea, executed decently. But that cool idea only lasts about 10 minutes until you realize you've already played the WHOLE game. Other games throw new stuff at you, but those 6 (or so) weapons and the 5 (or so) enemies really don't offer much.
The disability to delete objects renders the game obsolete, in my opinion.
I was kind of annoyed when I placed something wrong and had to restart. Not only that, but there isn't really a restart button (as far as I can tell), so you have to either reload the game or hasten your death in order to try again. Also, I know that upgrades can get excessively complex, but some simple ones might be nice. Something simple and linear, like the upgrades in Desktop Tower Defense, might be nice since the enemies get harder to kill in later levels. All in all a cute little game, but could use just a little bit more to be a winner. A medium/low graphics mode so it doesn't start to fritz out when I have forty snowmen?
Hi everyone,
Thanks for trying our game! It's still very much in beta, not a final version, so there are still a few balancing issues and technical bugs to fix. Thanks for the feedback! :)
If loading is taking a long time, try the latest version of Flash on IE7 (Windows) or Safari (Mac).
The game does take a long time to load. I tried using Internet Explorer to see if it worked any faster and couldnt get the game to load at all.
Yeah, I played this back when Corpse Craft was put up here and I tried out Whirled.
The biggest, most glaring issue, ever, concerning this game, is lag! MASSIVE lag! It makes the game really unenjoyable. Graphics are nice, of course, but are all those star particles necessary?
I can't seem to load this in Firefox. I turned off the NoScript for it but it's still saying I need to download Flash 9 even though I already have it.
This was working for me quite smoothly last week with Firefox 3, but today it's puttering out. Sorry guys, hopefully it will be working better later.
I was really addicted to this game with OOO rolled it out. The lack of a Destroy/Sell option drove me to tossing it out the window. I'll have to go back and play it again now that I've seen it here; see how much has changed since I was on Whirled about 3 months ago.
The lag, however, is almost becoming a trademark in all of their invention, releases, and updates. Being an avid Puzzle Pirates player, I'm still rather awed at 3 Rings for somehow taking away my ability to *only* play casual games.
This whole Whirled site just doesnt load for me - just sits on a black screen with a 'connecting to game server' box on it :(
Can it really be true that the box is identical to the trashcan except the box is more expensive *and* reloads more slowly? So that it is strictly irrational to ever use the box (unless you're trying to lose; only, there are easier ways to lose)? Or is it a way of writing in a hard mode? "Game to easy? try using the box!"
So I had nearly a perfect field, full of only trees and a few rocks, and with every single square used for maximum space. Not a single thing besides the bird made it very far, but it's impossible to stop the birds.
That's really REALLY annoying, and another reason why this game is simply not very good yet.
http://img390.imageshack.us/img390/8048/treedefax2.png
Has the game been removed from the website? When I click on either the link or the picture of the game on the right, a big black screen where the game is played states in the middle "That item could not be located." i'm using safari...
[Edit: Thanks for pointing this out. The game is no longer available on the Whirled site. I will update the review accordingly. -Jay]
Update