(Review) Transport Defender
Ah Transport Defender. If ever you wanted more out of your Clicker/Idle game, you need to look no further than this. This is the second Idle game that I was playing recently, but this one has a the ability to use your mouse and gain something from it (a damage modifier, money and damage if you speck into it). Transport Defender does offer something that no other Clicker/Idle game has offered me as of yet: a deep and convoluted upgrading system. There are so many things to click on and upgrade along the way with all of the guns/bullets/explosions there is plenty of things to keep you distracted or occupied, however you may want to view it. This is as you traverse the universe taking your goods somewhere while blasting baddies that follow you. Given all of that, is Transport Defender worth spending some time on? Let me break it down for you.
Unlike Holyday City: Reloaded which will give you plenty of things to click on that make obvious upgrades, Transport Defender throws a ton of math at you. That’s not that math is a problem, but that not every upgrade is apparent in what it does quickly. Some of them seem obvious on a basic level, but in upgrading every “feature” you’ll soon realize that it’s not a simple as it seems. Hypothetically let’s say you have a gun, cool right? Well yeh, that’s true enough. The next thing you may notice is that you can buy levels for the individual guns by the billions. You know you won’t be getting there any time soon. There are also seven more attainable upgrades (usually for damage) along with one when you reach level 50,000 on that individual gun with probably more after that. If you were to apply other game upgrade mechanics to it you would be able to upgrade the bullet speed/color/fire rate/damage/size/favorite color/birth day (all separately). There are 365 features, 26 guns to unlock and I don’t even know how many other things you can modify. All of these, of course, cost money and they only get more expensive (duh!) as you progress.
The main goal is to get to that point where you can no longer progress and you’ll need to do a reset with higher base stats. In the fashion of the rest of the game, it can’t be as simple as that could it? You’re right, sort of! There are two ways to reset. I call them the soft and hard flip. The soft flip starts you over at the first Sector. You keep all of the weapons (without the upgrades), feature upgrades and crew members. You’ll also gain access to all of the locked cargo that you accumulated in your last journey that you can now spend on more weapons, features and upgrades to help you get even farther on the new run. In spending cargo you will earn Sentinel Points (SP) that you can access when you do the hard flip which resets everything and starts you over from scratch with some buffs you picked up with your SP that you will spend and/or have spent. I would recommend saving up a lot of SP by spending a ton of cargo before you do the hard flip because it feels like starting all over with little reward if you didn’t spend enough points. It’s noticeable, but not very satisfying.
Unlike most Idle games, Transport Defender doesn’t offer as good an offline support as most others do early on. You have to speck into it and speck into it fairly hard at that. Even then, there isn’t as much as you would expect if you’re coming from other Idle games. It only lasts a certain amount of time and you have to buy it up to that point. There are options later on down the line that lets you generate more for longer, but I’m not sure how much farther down the progression track you must travel. Also, you have to buy it all separately. You have to buy the ability to generate money, damage and progress, along with cargo all independently of each other. It is doable, but this feels more like a game of patience than I’ve experienced from any other. Transport Defender is definitely a long-haul game.
As per the norm here, since Transport Defender is a free-to-play game, there is a way to support the developers with your hard-earned cash. You really don’t have to if you don’t want to, but you can because if you enjoy a game… I feel you should. You can pick up Transport Defender Coins or TD Coins for a price. You can gain these at the rate of five a day if you keep the game on the whole day. Later in the progress of the game you can increase number you get, but it is a long-haul for this as well.
Further Reading on Transport Defender: Steam
