Every stage gets harder and harder, as the enemy becomes faster, stronger, and more plentiful. As the enemy gets closer, you take your God-like hand, grab the helpless little men, and throw them mercilessly into the air. The game is meant to look like it was created in a classroom and believe it or not there's a certain charm to the style.Defend your Castle places you on a grassy plain with invaders attacking you from the west. The characters boast realistic-ish (how realistic can we get?) physics and intentionally crude animation. Scribbled stick figures run by in the foreground. Paper cut-out clouds float by in the backdrop. The visuals are much more stylized, not to mention designed for progressive-scan display. You grab, you fling, you shoot, and you do them all at breakneck speeds, but the experience never really changes.Дefend Your Castle for WiiWare has seen some welcomed upgrades over its Internet-released predecessor. At the same time, there's really no getting past the point that the challenges are redundant. If nothing else, the sheer level of replay value is impressive. There's a lot to it and it all goes on forever - the stages themselves are in infinite supply and merely increase in difficulty each time you win. The pit of conversion, another upgrade, enables you to pick up foes, drop them in a paint bucket, and convert them to your team. It reminds us of old-school games which lived and died by displays of twitch-finger skill and the points amassed by the best of the best.ДЄs you earn more points, you'll be able to buy necessary upgrades - fortify your castle, add archers and wizards, and more, in order to give yourself an advantage over the attacking armies. The result can border on disorienting, but it's also pretty amazing to see four reticules separately zipping around the screen tossing characters about and shooting down objects when applicable. Thankfully, developer XGen Studios has included the option for seamless jump-in (and out) multiplayer experiences, up to four gamers. In heroic mode, an option from the beginning, you be stormed by hordes of enemies from beginning to end, and as a result you must be blazing fast on the draw, flinging characters and exploding cap guns (for starters) at lightning speeds. The list goes on with different enemy types and greater speeds. Now, add in different enemy types, from those who roll exploding cap gun circles to those who wield popsicle sticks designed to crash through your castle door - you'll need to be strategic about your defenses, taking care of the most dangerous characters before they can do any damage. You'll need to be quick on the flinging if you hope to advance and suddenly the pace of the experience turns frantic and fun. With one or two villagers at a time, no problem, but the task of safeguarding your domain is quickly transformed into an altogether different beast when dozens of foes roll in from the west. For starters, more and more villagers frequent the static gameplay screen, always depicting the enemies from the left and your castle on the far right. The game starts out deceptively slow and you will be able to advance through a half dozen stages with ease, hurling stick-figure characters upward and to their untimely demise.ДЄs the levels progress, however, the difficulty increases and the title begins to come into its own.

Using your Wii remote, you control an on onscreen reticule (which looks like a bread tie) and by pressing and holding A or B you can pick villagers up and throw them into the air before they can reach your castle and do any harm. What you get for your money is most certainly not just a quick and dirty port of Internet game, although, admittedly, the two share certain fundamentals in common. Bear in mind the Defend Your Castle arrives to WiiWare on the cheap - 500 WIi Points or $5, to be precise, which puts it firmly on the lower end of the price scale compared to many of other currently available titles.

Defend your castle on wii