Attack on Titan: TD review: blasting titans like never before

If you think Attack on Titan games are all about using the three-dimensional maneuver gear (3DMG), think again.

Attack on Titan: TD is a tower defense game by Moblie Game and is based on the popular manga and anime of the same name. If you watched Attack on Titan, you know that cannons don’t work on titans. However, this game throws that idea out the window and puts you in the shoes of a recruit soldier whose job is to defend the city’s wall and its inhabitants all costs. Armed with your trusty canon, you aim at incoming titans and fend off wave after wave after wave until either the wall gets destroyed or the city is safe. Unfortunately the chances of you encountering the former is more likely, as there seems to be no end to these titans.

Gameplay: blast the meat dropping, gold-bearing titans to smithereens

The game starts with Mikasa Ackerman calling you to defend the wall with her. You then find yourself on top of the wall with Levi telling you to be alert and asking if you have forgotten how to operate the cannon. Below that message are images of two hands rotating a wooden wheel. This is the whole gameplay tutorial.

But, really, you don’t need a walkthrough to learn how to play this game. It’s really simple. You are armed with one cannon, which you aim by turning the wooden steering wheels. The left wheel steers towards the left (counter clockwise) while the right wheel steers towards the right (clockwise). You can only move one wheel at a time. This is the only control you will ever have over the cannon, as it automatically fires itself when the yellow bar at the bottom of the screen is full. The idea is to kill all the titans before they destroy the wall. Once they successfully hit the wall three times, it’s game over.

After having figured out how to operate the cannon, it’s time to blast the titans. The cannon’s movement is also quite slow and keeping up with the titans when they start increasing in number can be quite challenging especially because the cannon does not deal splash damage. Although it might take awhile to get your cannon lined up, the game tends to be a bit forgiving when it comes to aiming. There were several times where I felt that the cannon was angled incorrectly, but still hit the titan.

Aside from aiming the cannon right before it fires, you also have to consider that each titan you kill will drop gold and meat, which you can use to upgrade your arsenal and deploy troops respectively. You have to pick these up as soon as they appear on screen because they disappear fast. This is pretty easy at first, but as the titans increase in number, you will find yourself debating whether to position the cannon or pick up gold and meat. You will do this while wondering why you only have one cannon against a horde of titans in the first place or if this game was intended for a person with three hands.

To make things a bit easier, aside from the cannon, you also have the Survey Corps at your disposal, but only if you have enough meat to feed them. Yes, they eat the meat you get from fallen titans. Be aware that the Survey Corps are pretty squishy early on and don’t really help much until you upgrade them using gold. Sending them out without upgrades often means you’re sending them to an early grave.

Aside from the Survey Corps, you can also upgrade the cannon’s firing time, fire power, repelling or knock-back power, and even the amount of meat and gold that the titans drop. There also seems to be an option to summon Eren Jaeger’s titan form, but that seems to be disabled for now and I assume it will be added in later updates.