Plant a tree! Hug a skunk! Save the Earth! Stop the Woodcutter! What a bunch of hippie propaganda cleverly disguised to coerce those impressionable youth into an anti-lumber mindset! It’s radical left-wing liberal propaganda wrapped in a cute and cuddly fuzzy-wuzzy tower defense package.
The basis of the game is that the mean ol’ lumberjacks are trying to cut down the trees, much to the chagrin of the forest’s furry little inhabitants. The largely rodent population bands together to prevent those flannel-wearing tree carnivores from cutting down tress, laying ruin to the forest and (probably) devouring baby brains.
In typical tower defense fashion, the devilish lumberjacks attack nature in waves along a preset path. In between waves, the player can place a variety of animal units such as skunks, squirrels and beehives that will attack the lumberjacks with righteous nature-fueled attacks of justice! The animals can be upgraded in between rounds or on the fly as the lumberjacks march past on their quest for ruination.
There is the standard fare of both attacking units and defensive units to place along the forest, including ones to slow down attackers, increase attack power, and units that specialize in air attacks and underground attacks. It isn’t anything that hasn’t been seen before or done in other tower defense games, but it’s completely functional and has an appealing art style.
The graphics are very colorful and cartoony and everything animates very well. The animals may be trying to prevent hard-working Americans from doing their jobs and feeding their families, but at least it has a sense of humor about it and a charming attitude as squirrels pelt lumberjacks with slingshots and skunks fling their nauseating stink bombs.
As with other games of its ilk, success becomes largely dependent upon trial and error. As the levels start to have multiple branching paths, it becomes impossible to determine where to place units without knowing what route each posse of nature’s grim reapers will trod across and which units of carnage will comprise it. So, each round typically consists of making a guess, failing, and then revising the strategy and placement to compensate for what went wrong the prior round. This is a problem inherent to the genre and not unique to Stop the Woodcutter!, but some other titles at least reveal what types of enemies will be attacking prior to the first round.
There is nothing terribly bad to say about Stop the Woodcutter!, but it ultimately doesn’t do enough to break the mold. There are about as many tower defense games as there are trees growing on the Earth, so it is a tough market to really crack into. Unfortunately, the number of trees continues to swindle while the tower defense population skyrockets. Anyway we can program them to produce oxygen or habitats for small animals? If you’re a tower defense nutball or want to sample the genre for the first time, Stop the Woodcutter! isn’t a terrible investment for $3, but it doesn’t do anything particularly groundbreaking.
Stop the Woodcutter! was provided for review by Bidibidip Games. It is available for 240 MS points ($3)
