Dark Breakers Review – Conquer the world, one enemy at a time

Our rating:

By: Wet Productions

Version #: 0.95

Date Released: 2014-10-11

Developer: Wet Productions

Price: 0

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Like it or not, tower defense games are a thing. In some sense a subgenre of RTS games (how many Age of Empires or Command and Conquer games were essentially a tower defense phase followed by an army rush?,) they started getting big in Flash and somehow exploded more into mainstream with the nonsensical Plants vs. Zombies. Dark Breakers is a very interesting tower defense game, because it’s got a little of everything. Mixes tower defense with MMO with heavy build-and-control-resources phases.

Dark Breakers is set in some apocalyptical future where only the toughest survive… and not much more is known. Not like you need it, the game is pretty straightforward: manage your resources, build an army, defense your resources and plunder your (online) enemies. So far, so good.

When you sign up and get your piece of terrain, you have a starting lot of resources (which include food, silver and gems, which are a form of in-app currency) and a relatively limited area where you can build, also a shack (where your lone worker lives) and a command center are given to you from the beginning. Buildings include barracks, training grounds, guard towers, silver mines, gardens/farms and some kinds of fortifications and defenses. Also, very importantly, silver and food stores. Each of the buildings can be upgraded (at quite a steep cost in silver or food) so you can either house more soldiers in the barracks, train better (or different) kinds of soldiers or mine silver or harvest food more efficiently.

Your controlled area can be defended 100% from attacks by having shields (which can only be purchased with gems, which are essentially earned via In-App Purchases, although you can also find them by removing trees or rocks from your area, or via earning achievements) which last a set amount of days and have a relatively large cooldown. Also, once you are attacked you won’t be attacked again during a set amount of time, so you have time to rebuild. And now we are getting to the interesting part… what are attacks like?

For the defender, attacks are just a pain. The hard part of attacks is earlier, when you prepare your defenses. You can wall out parts of your base (walls are handy to delay enemies while your active defenses take care of them), or use defense towers, which house snipers. Bunkers can be staffed with soldiers, sharpshooters or grenadiers, working wonders against dense offense packs. Mortars are probably the most effective defense. If you don’t believe me, try to attack a mortar head-on. Yeah, go on. Mines and jaws (like those hunter traps made of iron) are passive, but effective, defenses, effective outside of your base. In any case, unless you have perfect defenses you’ll be plundered, quite likely, and you’ll keep scratching your head about how to best defend your resources. For the attacker is more interesting. You attack with all your soldiers (if you choose so) and decide where they are deployed individually. Soldiers attack the closest enemy building and move towards the next once destroyed. Hence, a good placement of guard towers or mortars can devastate invaders… But no matter what, there are always blind spots where you can attack grain silos or silver containers. Or at least you’ll have an epic battle where most of your enemy’s defenses will be lost forever. Good enough! As for attacking options, soldiers warriors and wreckers are the “basic grunts”. Thieves are an effective lightweight unit to alleviate your enemy’s overflowing stashes and sharpshooters are great from a distance against units… but suck against buildings. You have demolition experts for that, which place bombs on buildings and then go on with a shotgun. Effective for bringing down enemy buildings. Grenadiers can bypass a small distance behind walls and medics can keep your units alive for a while longer. A wide array of units to choose from!

You can also form alliances with fellow players, with whom you can have a private, alliance-level chat (there’s a global chat, too, which is neat for taunting :D) The only drawback is that building an embassy is worth a lot, so it can take quite a bit of game-playing to get up to there.

In short: If you like tower defense and/or MMO, Dark Breakers may be perfect for you. And in any case, it is free so it is worth checking only for that. Also, Dark Breakers is in constant improvement. So, if you’d like to see some new unit, building or game action, contact the developers!