Overview
When Human Head Studios Fort Courage was first released I wasn’t crazy about it, but decided to revisit it last week and am now a full-fledged Fort Courage fan. After spending a week beating up mummies, spiders, and other spooks here’s what I thought about Fort Courage.
Fort Courage is a 3D castle defense game set inside the mind of a child whose dozed off and started daydreaming at school. Instead of defending a castle you’ll get to control 2 kids defending their makeshift fort from a variety of ghouls and beasties. You basically stay behind your barricade and alternate between shooting, throwing, and setting up gadgets while collecting any drops the enemy leaves behind.
The kid on the right side is your gunner while the one on the left is a specialist in tossing things and setting up gadgets. The way you go
about shooting is simple as you just need to tap a weapon slot and an enemy to fire. Throwing things is easy as well, but you do have to take into account the enemies movement and line up your shots properly as ammo will get very, very expensive.
Every weapon or item in Fort Courage is upgradable, and there’s quite an assortment to choose from. Player One gets things like pumpkins, ray guns, and rocket launchers while Player Two gets to chuck scary bombs, goo grenades and other gadgets. Every weapon or device in the game has its own advantages which you’ll want to take into account depending on the enemies you’re about to face.
Another thing to take into account is the fact that Player One’s weapons run off of unlimited ammo, but Player Two’s arsenal has to be refilled. As you’d expect all these goodies will cost you a bit of coin, luckily they’re not hard to earn and you can buy some outright if you want to get ahead in the game.
As far as depth goes Fort Courage has plenty of it. You’ll get to battle it out in three different settings with the Monster Lab, Dinosaur Jungle, and Robot Lab. Each area has 21 different stages that increase in difficulty and there’s an extreme mode for each area as well. Any good game needs big bad bosses and Fort Courage gives you those in the form of a mini-boss and big boss in each area. There are also several player skins that can be bought if you don’t like the original duo.
Verdict
As mentioned I wasn’t overly impressed the first time I played Fort Courage, but a lot has changed as the developers have addressed some bug issues and made it a little easier for players starting out. New players will now have a few more weapons to start out with, but unfortunately it doesn’t solve the games real issues which is with in-app purchases. Fort Courage is one of the tougher games I’ve played this year which sucks considering that the game is geared towards making you have to buy things through the IAP setup. I actually gave up playing the game before before making it to the second area as it got old having to play past levels for a few extra coins as you don’t earn that many during gameplay and weapons/upgrades are expensive. Using Gree to let you buy coins hampers the game as well as you’ll need to login/signup to a seperate service just for that. If you have a Tegra device that can run it and feel like being extremely frustrated you can pick up Fort Courage for free on Google Play.