Jelly Defense App Review

Smartphone App Review:
Jelly Defense 

Jelly Defense is an immersive tower defense game for smartphones. Both the iOS and Android platforms have the game available. It is also available in the Mac App Store for Apple computers.

Even if you are not a fan of tower defense type games, the colorful graphics are appealing. The game is a bit harder to play than the cute graphics indicate. Everything looks soft and squishy in the game.

Tower Defense

These types of games have the enemies moving from one point on the screen to another. The player has to place towers in strategic locations so that the enemies are destroyed before reaching their exit point on the screen. Sometimes you are given certain places your towers can be placed. This is the case with Jelly Defense. Other times the placement of your towers is up to you. This can affect the path that the enemies travel.

Tower defense games range from simplistic to very difficult. Jelly Defense lands closer to the difficult end of the spectrum.

Storyline

The Diploglobe world is invaded by Kiwi Halvas who come in various colors to destroy the planet. Each type of creature on the Diploglobe can eliminate various Kiwi Halva troops. With each wave the Kiwi Halvas get more difficult and numerous, but you are able to upgrade your Jelly Defenders as the game progresses.

The inhabitants of Diploglobe need a leader to tell them where to mount their defense. That leader is you. No single tower can destroy all enemies. Blue towers are for blue enemies while red towers defend against the red ones. The concept is simple enough. Don’t get caught with too many of the wrong color and you are able to clear each level.

Gameplay

There is a great tutorial that helps you learn what each tower type can accomplish. In the tutorial you are just taught the three basic towers. Later in the game you learn about more advanced towers when they become available. This keeps the tutorial short and easy to understand.

The main gameplay screen is the Diploglobe. You can choose the level you would like to play. It is possible to choose past levels to get a better score on them. Mainly you have to play the levels in a certain order (to learn about the new tower types), but there are occasions when you choose which new level you would like to play.

I have only played the game on the Android platform, but the screenshots I have seen from the other platforms, the game is very similar across devices.

One of the frustrations I have had with the game is that there is no option menu to turn off the music and game sounds. If there is, I certainly haven’t found it. It requires that I lower the volume on my phone to mute the game. Then I have to remember to turn the volume up for other purposes. I would like to have separate music and game sound volume controls inside some options menu.

Price

There are different prices for different versions of the game. Keep an eye out for special price drops too if you are not keen on spending much for a game.

The Android version of the game was given away as a free app of the day at the Amazon Appstore for Android. The normal price for the game is $2.99. Amazon occasionally runs one of their free apps through the system again. So if you missed it last time you might get lucky and find it again for free.

While the current price for the iTunes/iOS version of the game is $2.99, they had an introductory price of $.99 for quite some time. It may go back down to that price again if the game designers want to boost their installed base. This usually happens when designers are trying to use one game to promote a new game coming soon.

I don’t know how different the Mac version of the game is, but it costs $4.99 in the Mac App Store.

The size of the app is between 50 and 100 MB. The Android version of Jelly Defense is the smallest version with the iOS version being the largest.

Final Thoughts

I am a fan of tower defense games, therefore I really enjoy Jelly Defense. If you know you are not a fan, then you may not like the game because of that. You certainly can’t dislike it for the fun, squishy looking graphics. If you don’t know whether you like tower defense games or not because you have never played a good one, this is a great introductory game to the genre.

Much of the video shows the story line, but is not necessarily a true representation of the gameplay. The gameplay is not 3D. I think the developers made a cute video, but, unfortunately it is not very helpful in giving you a true sense of how the game works.