Snowscape Heroes review: defending earth from peaches

Ever wanted to save the earth from weird-looking alien invaders? Snowscape Heroes: Invasion of the Black Peaches is an iOS tower defense game from Japanese developer One-Up that offers you the chance to do just that. Can you stop the Black Peaches from conquering the earth? More importantly, should you?

Gameplay: deep in the snow

At its heart, Snowscape Heroes is a very simple tower defense game, although not the sort of tower defense game you’re thinking of. You start with a tower on one side of the screen, and the Black Peaches start with one on the other. You have a set “MP” meter that increases at a set rate per second (which you can increase by leveling up your spell book for a prescribed number of MP), and you use your MP to summon your various characters (each has its own cost and cooldown time before you can re-summon) in the hopes that they battle off the Black Peaches characters. You’ve also got an earth on your tower that you can use once each game to auto-clear some of the Black Peach units.

There’s not much strategy involved because the game takes place on a single two-dimensional line. All your units start from your tower and the Black Peaches units start from theirs, then they walk towards each other and fight. You control only which units you summon and when you choose to use your MP to level up your spell book rather than summoning another character; the only benefit you get from leveling up the book is that you generate MP at a faster rate. If this all sounds a bit complicated, it isn’t. Here’s the game in action, first with a boss battle and then a regular battle after a little tour of the menus:

One thing that needs to be said about Snowscape Heroes is that it is absurdly deep for a mobile game. There are a boatload of arenas to play on, more than a hundred different characters to unlock, there’s a deep system of materials and keys that controls the unlocking and upgrading process, and there’s even PvP multiplayer and the ability to use friends’ party leaders as support characters in your own game. To get the obvious out of the way: I haven’t seen everything there is to see in the game, or even come close. If you wanted to, I don’t doubt you could spend hours and hours immersed in Snowscape Heroes.

Except, of course, that you couldn’t, because the game features a stamina system — oh, how I hate them — that’ll stop you playing after five or six battles. Then you can wait while your 20-point stamina bar fills up again at the agonizing rate of ten minutes per point (or more than three hours for a full bar refill, although you do get a bar refill when you level up). Unless, of course, you want to cough up some cash for stamina elixir, which costs $0.99 in the game’s shop. $0.99 for how much stamina, you ask? I have no idea. The game describes what you get as “some stamina”. I don’t like throwing money away without even knowing what I’m getting, so I didn’t try it.

UPDATE 7-2-2014: I’m told by the developers that following my posting this review, the team has tweaked the stamina system and clarified how much stamina you’re buying when it’s purchased from the shop, so the issues described in the previous paragraph may no longer apply to the current version of the game.

And ultimately, I don’t think there’s much reason for you to take that risk either, because as deep as Snowscape Heroes is in terms of its RPG elements, the basic gameplay just isn’t that much fun. It’s too simple. Regular tower defense games are fun because there’s a strategy to where you place your units to funnel the creeps. Snowscape Heroes has some strategy in that you can choose your party and choose which characters to unlock and upgrade, but once you’re actually in battle, there are basically only two strategies: place units as fast as you can and upgrade your spell book when there’s a lull, or upgrade your spell book several times immediately and then just spam units as fast as possible for the rest of the game.