Muno Defense: unique tower defense – Review

Muno Defense is an interesting and unique look at the ever popular tower defense genre of games. Instead of towers or tanks or magic, you are in charge of a body’s immune system, fighting off nasty germs that are traveling down pathways to a healthy cell.

The graphics are very clean and fit the game nicely. There was one stage where parts started to glitch and flash because of the number of objects in the area, but it did not affect gameplay at all and I only encountered this bug once.

You start by placing nodes where you would like your “towers” to be. DNA strands will appear and by combining two of them together you can then place the resulting cell into a node and choose what type of defense you want to control. There are the basic “shooting” cell, white blood cells that send out little cells to fight germs, and red blood cells attach themselves to germs and slow them down. You can also use the touch controls to pinch DNA to create “vitamins” which you pull over to a tower to slowly level it up. Vitamins will appear on their own as well, and there is an item that will take up a tower slot temporarily to produce vitamins. Because of this, leveling up the cells is simple and a lot less hectic than most games where you have to manage coins and pay to power up towers. I really liked this mechanic.

At the end of each pathway is a germ generating vine with a timer. You can speed up the germ invasion by double tapping the timer, which gives you a bonus and the golden shields which act as premium currency in the game. Sometimes, “boss germs” will appear. The game has a toggle to speed up the action, but it only goes to 2x speed which doesn’t seem fast enough once you get a good tower setup. Each stage rewards you with golden shields.

The game allows you to play the first five levels free, which took awhile to finish so I imagine the game to last. Unlocking new areas is only 0.99 and it includes a bonus amount of shield coins. Coins can be used for permanent upgrades as well as items to use in levels.

Muno Defense was a lot of fun. It’s so easy to put out yet another tower defense game and yet the setting, mechanics and graphics of Muno have a fresh take and is certainly worth a play.