Road Defense: Outsiders – PS4 Review

Road Defense: Outsiders is a hybrid twin-stick shooter/tower defense game from Brazilian-based studio Minicactus Games.  It’s set in a futuristic wild west where you’ve got to safely escort vehicles across ten waves of action while an absolute horde of enemy cowboys try to destroy the cars and you.

You’ve got five ways to fight back though, two manual and three passive.  Your main way of attacking is via the game’s simple twin-stick set up.  You move with the left stick, aim with the right and shoot with R2 (as ever, we’d have much preferred it to fire when you aim rather than just having to hold down the trigger button for minutes at a time) however you’ve only got a basic revolver which has an inconvenient reload time.  Also, there’s no auto-aim at all which is an issue here as the isometric perspective can be a little confusing and your enemies are stick thin little fellas, just a few pixels in width.

It’s weird that they didn’t implement auto-aiming as your movement on the left stick does have a noticeable, and inconvenient, snap to the cardinal directions.  Why do that if you’re going to insist on fully analogue aiming?

Your next way of attacking manually, well semi-manually, is your axe.  With an even heftier reload time, the axe can be thrown with L2 and will deal heavier damage to a few nearby enemies (it homes in on them).  This is kind of useful at the start of the game and then becomes a total irrelevance later on as you power up your main gun.

And then there are the passive ways of attacking.  Your character is followed around by a drone that does a little bit of damage to anyone who gets close while the cars you protect also have a similar auto-targeting weapon to do some damage to attackers.  However, the main show here comes with the turrets.  Each stage has a number of fixed points where you can attach a tower-based turret.  There are eight different weapon types from pistols, rifles and shotguns to more useful weapons – namely the laser and, more crucially, the bomb.  These do a good amount of damage to any targets that get too close to them and are the real key to success in the game.

There are only six stages and the number of turret point they have varies from 1 to 8, albeit with no logical build to it (the fifth stage has one turret while the final stage has two with larger amounts tied to the middle stages).  These turrets can also be upgraded with cash that is dropped each time a vehicle safely makes it to the end of the road, or sometimes offered as a perk each time you level up.

With it’s stylish isometric, Gameboy-palette unique visual style, initially Road Defense: Outsiders has quite a bit of promise but unfortunately it falls victim to something that this genre often has a problem with.  You see, there are two types of tower defense game essentially.  Those that require actual strategy and skill to get through (such as the old iOS game GeoDefense) and, the far more common type, those where you basically just brute force your stat upgrades until you get to a point where success is viable.

Road Defense is definitely one of the latter.  There are levels that you’ve got absolutely no hope of beating without significant upgrading but it’s all very inconsistent.  For example, the first level is kind of a breeze, the second needs a bit of upgrading and then the third is a massive step up, requiring a lot of grinding to get through.  Then we managed to beat the fourth level first time before really struggling with the fifth.  And the final level would have been first time but the game succumbed to a fairly regular bug where a wave wouldn’t end because the last enemy hadn’t spawned.

The key to success anyway is just to save enough money for the bomb tower and enough upgrades.  You’ll need to beef up the vehicle’s armour too or else it’ll get shredded by enemy attacks (lose four out of ten on a level and you’ll fail the whole stage).  But ultimately you never feel like you’ve outsmarted the enemy rather than just out-grinding them.

Aside from some other minor issues (such as the text not being formatted correctly on the perk screens and some radically inconsistent sound effect volume levels), it’s that overall game loop that’s the real issue here.  Success is inevitable as long as you grind enough but grinding takes no skill because you’re either strong enough or you’re not.  Sure, you may need to run around a bit avoiding enemy fire but there’s not much actual skill required which ultimately makes everything feel a bit flat.

There’s definitely potential here and we can’t say we didn’t have times where we enjoyed the process of upgrading and then actually being able to beat a level but ultimately this isn’t a well-balanced game and it seems to be a very rough and ready port.  If you improved the controls, made the death animations quicker (defeated enemies have a way of lingering that doesn’t help) and sped up the grind a little, this could be interesting, especially given its fairly unique presentation but ultimately it’s just not a very well designed game.