Xeno Tactic

Xeno Tactic is a tower defense game that takes some of the best elements from other tower defense games and does nothing with them. In other words, if you've played any of the others, you've played this one.

The only new element is the mission based maps. Beat Mission 1 and the next map is opened up. But, keep in mind the game is still the same, just the map changes. Mission 1 - 5 are fairly simple, with little challenge to them. Level 6 pits you against 100 creep waves, and I haven't beaten it yet.

The game is buggy (I kept losing all my money, plus I'm not sure the damage was always being assigned), but the graphics are good and the sound fx are better than most. Also, if you're about to lose, quit (button is at the top right) rather than wait for the last creep to go. If you lose the game, you have to start over at Mission 1 (how annoying is that?).

Play Xeno Tactic at onlinegamesquad.

Castle Wars

Castle Wars is a card game, similar to arcomage or magic. Your job is to build up your castle and/or destroy your opponents castle. You do so by attacking, building, casting spells, etc...

The graphics and sound are pretty basic, but the strategy is interesting. There is a chat and multiplayer is possible or you can play against the computer at beginner or advanced level.

Each round starts off by increasing your resources. There are three types: bricks, weapons and crystals. For every builder, soldier or magic you have, you get one of each resource. Then you play one card from your hand (eight cards are in your hand). That card costs X amount of resources. Any cards that you can play, i.e. you have enough resources to do so, will be highlighted. If you can't play a card, or if you choose not to, you will need to discard instead (hold the ctrl button and click on the card you wish to discard).

If you build your castle up to 100 or reduce your opponents castle to 0, you win the game.

Hints and Tips:
Build up your resources in the beginning rather than trying to attack or build up your own castle. I don't believe you can rush attack or be destroyed quickly enough to make it worthwhile. Instead, try to play the soldier, school, or magician cards early on. If you can, build up your crystal stores as much as you can.

The Curse card subtracts one from each category and adds one to each category and is extremely powerful. Think about it. If you are suddenly taking in 4 resources each round, while your opponent is limited to 1...

Play Castle Wars at kongregate.

Eye Defence

Eye Defence is a mixture of grow, hapland and defend your castle. You control a gross eye thing (their wording, not mine) from hordes of mechanical soldiers. That's a fairly good description if by hordes, they mean about a dozen. There are only three levels, and despite how frustrating it is to figure out a good way to win, I wanted more by the end.

Place the various items that pop up in your inventory onto your gross eye thing. By placing them in the right place at the right time, you can defend yourself from the attackers. Place them in the wrong place, shoot at the wrong time, or just make one mistake and its game over.

The nice part about having to start over, however, you don't have to go back to level one. You just restart on the level you're on.

Hint, the rotational devices can be placed on the eye or at the end of the sticks. By combining them, you can reach pretty far and cover a wide area. Also, on level two, the flame throwing thing with the pointed ears takes a few hits before it goes down. To get past him, you'll need to hit him multiple times, probably with two different saws. Also, if you're trying to rely on the rockets that fly around to hit your enemies, you're on the wrong track.

If you're stuck, there's a nice walkthrough posted by will7303 at jayisgames. I needed the help to get through level 2 because I didn't think about how to combine the sticks with the rotational devices. I was trying to rely on the rockets, which left me short when the ufo flew by and dropped its bomb on me.

Play Eye Defence at foon.

BTW, you do know what SNOITALUTARGNOC means, right?

Potion Panic

Potion Panic is similar to other 'defend your castle' games in which your object is to defend yourself from the oncoming enemies. This time you're defending yourself from oncoming skeletons, spiders, slugs and later on some giants.

You defend yourself using various types of mixtures from the blue, red and yellow vats above you. Then you fire the concoction at your enemies by aiming and setting the power with your mouse. When your bomb lands, it will do damage based on what type of bomb you built.

The thing is, however, I found this game boring and so I kept getting diverted trying to do something different. Eventually, because I was distracted and not trying all that hard to kill off the charging enemies, my wall would fall and one of the spiders would get close enough to kill me off. What I like about the other defend your castle games is the ability to upgrade your 'castle' and eliminate yourself from the equation except for the really hard boss types. You can't do that here. Also, although I never got there, this game ends after x levels (it's either 30 or 42 depending on the source).

The only thing going for it is the experimentation you can do to try different methods of burning, exploding, poisoning etc... But really, it's not that fascinating. Try as I might, I can't get excited over killing the oncoming hordes using a poison shot rather than a fireball or an acid ball.

Various attempts at building something new and I came up with the following:
explosions: 2-1-1 or 13-9-4 works well. Does some nice damage and gets you through the first levels.
Poison: 1:2:2 (1-2-3 gives you a nice purple poison cloud and is effective for many levels. But doesn't work as well against the white skeletons or red spiders).
acid: 5-20-10 is effective against the witch because it sticks to her.
flames: 3-3-3: flames were the most effective for me, doing the most damage and was basically capable of killing anything with little fuss.

The more potion you use, the more you have to pay to replace it, which is why 1-2-3 works so well. You won't have to buy any more potion since it uses up so little. You'll be able to upgrade (I recommend the flames and the quick reload).

BTW, your wall gets fully healed in between rounds, so don't worry about the damage it takes. Unless it fully falls in which case set your cannon to fire 100-100-100 for full damage full spread fire. And don't miss.

Hint: Listen to the sound effects. You'll be able to tell what's about to come at you if you pay attention. That allows you to switch your mixture to whatever you feel is most effective. Also, you can buy potions and switch your mixture while the game is paused (space bar), so take advantage of that.

Play Potion Panic at ninjakiwi.

Mindfields 2 - The Russian Tundra Walkthrough

Mindfields 2: The Russion Tundra Walkthrough is a nice diversion. Although the soundtrack is awful and they really should have given you the option of turning it off, I still thought it was a good puzzle game.

Place various objects (turn signals, shooting squares, or transports) to guide your tank through each battlefield. You may have to eliminate some enemy tanks, time your way past some electrical fields, or just puzzle your way through a long path.

I'll post a walkthrough in the comments section in case you get stuck trying to make your way through the eighteen levels. Some were easy, others were really hard. But still fun.

Play Mindfields 2 at gamesheep.

Sea of Fire

Sea of Fire is a strategy game from armorgames. I feel like I've played this game before but I can't remember what it was called.

Build up your base on just seven possible spots. The best strategy is to build up your defense, either through defensive gun enplacements and/or building your airforce to keep your opponent down, while building up your money supply. As soon as you have enough money rolling in, take out your defensive buildings and start building your factories and such.

Do yourself a favor and conquer the outer island first before striking across the mainland. In fact, do it in this order. Take the territory with the gold resource so that you can build up your finances, then the oil. Then move west to the end of the outer island. Then move south to finish the outer regions. Then strike at the mainland. You can take the capital whenever you get close enough to it, but that ends the game.

BTW, make sure you build an anti-missile laser as soon as you are able to as part of your defensive scheme. There's nothing worse than losing half your base to a missile.

Overall, not much of a game, but strategy games are few and far between.

Play Sea of Fire at fpflashfarm.

Luminara

Luminara is a clone of geometry wars, with all the eye-splitting fireworks that go along with it. The music is fun, the gameplay is simple, and the action is fierce.

You are circle in the midst of oncoming squares, triangles and circles. Use your mouse to aim and shoot (just hold the mouse button down) your enemies before they close in on you. Each attacker has their own style, from random movement up to charging right at you. Some will break apart and come at you in smaller pieces while others will work together to come after you. You can dodge using the arrow keys or the wasd keys.

As I said, the gameplay is simple, and there are only 50 levels to beat (they go very quickly). My second time through I beat the game and got 572,345 points. It's not very challenging, but served as a nice break (hint: try not to move around too much. Its too easy to lose track of your guy in the mess).

Play Luminara at armorgames.

Slitherlink

Slitherlink is a tough puzzle game based on a Japanese paper logic game. Draw one line along the edges of the squares so that each box that is marked with a number has the correct number of lines passing it by. So, if the box has a three in it, that box should have three of its four edges covered by a line to solve the puzzle.

No figure eights, no loops (except for the big one) and you have to draw your line on the edges. Keep in mind you can block off edges by using shift and the left mouse button to put an x on that edge. Its a very useful tool for helping you picture the solution.

See the picture... I've made a mistake somewhere and can't finish the one on the left, as is. On the right, I've made my corrections and finished this puzzle. On to the next!

Quite addicting and frustrating at the same time. There are 75 puzzles in all, 25 easy, 25 medium and 25 hard. I'm having trouble getting through the easy ones.

Unfortunately, the game does not save your progress for you, but you can figure out where you left off last time.

Play slitherlink at vgreality. Thanks to JIG for finding this fun puzzler.

VR Defender Y3K: Walkthrough

VR Defender Y3K is another tower defense game, this time from armorgames. Place your towers to defend your server from the invading viruses (I might be getting the story line incorrect, but the back story just isn't important).

As with other tower defense games, you have several different types of towers to choose from. Take your pick (if you can afford it), place them strategically, and blow the creeps (viruses) up before they hit the tower (server). There are several different levels; easy, hard, very hard and impossible. The difference is in the map. Both easy and hard have 51 waves to beat. I haven't tried the other two.

Walkthrough: To beat hard, this is what I did: Place two machine guns near the beginning. If you blow up the inset picture, you'll see the first one on the middle left, the second one under the first n in congratulations. Then, I upgraded them both three times (alternating, so there is never more than one level difference between them).

Then I could afford to build a flame thrower on the corner (see picture, under the ti and just below the on in congratulations). By building them on the corner, they could hit the creeps as they were coming and as they were going. Again, I alternated upgrading them to level 3.

At that point, I built a couple of lightning towers. Again, I alternated upgrading them to level 3. Lightning towers have the added ability to freeze creeps for up to 2 seconds. As the creeps get harder, you're going to need more time to kill them off.

Then I started building light towers. I would only upgrade them once, then I would build another one. They have a large enough reach that upgrading them more than that would be a waste of time. These are the towers that do the most damage in my solution.

To finish the game, I would build both lightning (scatter them around) and light towers (in the center). I would upgrade the lightning towers to level 3 and the light towers to level 2. The lightning towers would freeze them, while the light towers would do the most damage. My reasoning for only going to level 2 for the light towers was thus: I could either wait to build up enough money to upgrade to level 3, or I could go ahead and build another tower. I'd rather have another tower sooner, given their long range.

I've seen other solutions involving freezing towers and void tower. I can never get the creeps to bunch up well with the frost towers but, if you're inclined to do it that way, feel free.

Play VR Defender Y3K at armorgames.

Bloons and More Bloons

Bloons and More Bloons (50 more levels) are fun time wasters from fizzlebot. Aim and fire darts in an effort to blow balloons. That way you can move onto the next level and blow even more balloons up.

The monkey holds the dart in his hand. Simply aim with the mouse, then hold down the left mouse button to set your velocity, and let go to fire. Special balloons on each level (I found the pacman balloon particularly funny) help you out.

Bloons came out a short while ago and I spent a fun afternoon working my way through all 50 levels. More Bloons just came out and seems to be 50 more levels that are even more difficult and new specialized balloons. I haven't made my way through all 50 of the new ones, yet. I found the death star (#11, see image) to be particularly difficult.

Update: I'm getting a lot of traffic for people looking for a walkthrough for more bloons. If you're stuck on a particular level, post a comment below. If you leave the password for the level you're stuck on, I'll let you know how I beat it.