As we highlighted in our preview of the title from PAX, Sol Survivor is a tower defense game with a sci-fi feel to it; from the creeps that are protected by force fields to the rail gun and tesla coil turrets.  The premise behind the campaign mode (which has a very loose story to connect each of the maps) is that you are a commander with Sol Paragon, an intergalactic military-type organization charged with the task of protecting the colonists and resources of various planets from the evil Ascendancy (the "creeps").  If too many creeps make it from their landing location to the base (or bases, in some maps) that you’re defending, then you lose and have to start the level over.

Throughout the campaign, your commander chooses his Executive Officer (or XO) from a diverse roster of candidates.  Each of the 10 XOs has his or her own mix of turrets he or she can build in order to defeat the creeps, as well as a different mix of support functions that are used to aid the turrets in the creeps’ destruction.  These support functions, something new to a tower defense game, include such abilities as firing missiles down on advancing foes, hitting them with a firebomb, or dropping a nuke.  While most of the support functions fall into the category of pure offense, other functions provide different kinds of assistance like increasing the rate of fire for turrets’ within a particular area, or causing the enemies to turn around and run back for a short period of time.  In a genre where that extra bit of firepower and/or time to shoot at something means the difference between victory and defeat, these functions really come in handy.  The support abilities, though, are not limitless as each one costs a certain amount of “energy,” a resource that does regenerate over time but not fast enough to provide you with a consistent means of eliminating the creeps; the turrets still do the heavy lifting for that.  These abilities, however, do allow for a new kind of co-op for tower defense games, and add a fairly interesting strategic element to a co-op mode that’s been around since the tower defense mods for games like Starcraft and Age of Empires.

A sample of some of the support abilities you have at your disposal

Sol Survivor offers co-op seekers two forms of co-op play: Duo Campaign and Cooperative multiplayer.  The Duo Campaign, which is limited to just two players either locally or on-line, splits the responsibility of building turrets and using support abilities between the players and allows them to choose a map from any of the solo campaign maps they wish to play.  Even though it’s not a true campaign co-op mode where you progress level by level the same way you do in the solo campaign, there isn’t much of an overarching story that you’d miss out on by jumping straight to the last map.  Once you’ve selected your map, players can choose which XO they wish to play.  The first player has access to the turrets from the XO they select and the second player uses the support abilities of the XO they select, which means that you can come up with some pretty deadly combinations.  Due to the relative strength of some creeps and the amount of damage the support abilities can provide directly, the second player takes on a bit more of a passive role than the player in charge of the turrets, with the occasional last minute save thanks to a well paced gas cloud or missile barrage.  This mode serves as a good introduction to the game for any first time tower defense players, and it works well as a fairly casual play experience, but more seasoned tower defense players looking for more of a challenge and a bit more co-op will likely want to skip straight to the Cooperative multiplayer mode.

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Tags: xbox live arcade 4 player co-op reviews sol survivor




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