Whatever drives our cultural obsession with 1950s sci-fi, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of it losing power. Retro-futurism has created an entire subgenre of game settings, from the ironic wastelands of Fallout to far more earnest interpretations. And why not? Video games pretty much rely on campiness. What better way to frame a game than through corny humor and black-and-white morality? Fortified stacks four sturdy symbols of American ingenuity against a seemingly unending horde of alien invaders bent on destruction. Mankind nears total annihilation as these mechanical monstrosities march on our homes. Only the bravery of our heroes can save the day!
Fortified is an action/tower-defense hybrid that has you constructing turrets and other emplacements to stop oncoming waves of alien robots. Along with constructed defenses, you’ll take the fight directly to the bad guys with a variety of more immediate weapons, from rifles to freeze rays. Each of the four playable characters has a unique ability that will help them out of a pinch, allowing things like invincibility, increased damage, or the power of flight. Each character starts with a small, unique selection of weapons and emplacements, and each completed level gives you experience, and as you level up you’ll gain points to spend on new unlocks or upgrades for existing gear.
Status effects rule over pretty much any other type of damage. The slowing effects of freeze weapons and the damage-over-time provided by fire feel significantly more effective than pretty much anything else. A few options, like the lightning-chaining tesla weapons, I used once and never again. Maybe there’s a hidden use for them, but the game doesn’t do a terrific job of explaining the benefits of its individual weapon types. That problem reared its head in a big way for me during the first boss fight, where I had to replay a mission at least five times because I didn’t realize that anti-air weapons made mincemeat of otherwise unstoppable giant foes. Of the dozen defense types your character can unlock, you can only bring a total of six into a level with you, and I’d often find myself successfully relying on just three or four of those.
Fall before the might of my freeze-ray, alien scum!
Your construction choices are pretty forgiving. As you’d expect, you get a set amount of cash at the start of a level, and more comes as you destroy enemies and complete waves. What you might not expect is that selling an emplacement gives you a total refund, allowing you to completely reconfigure your defenses every single round. If one round were to feature nothing but air enemies, you could easily sell all your terrestrial defenses to build anti-air, then reconfigure again when ground-based enemies returned to the field. You can’t spend money on upgrades for your already placed defenses, so your construction choices are just a matter of where and how many.
The simplicity of the tower-defense aspect puts the focus more on the action you directly control. The shooting is fine, though it lacks the impact that a more traditional shooter would have. You’ll bring two weapons into battle. Almost exclusively, you’ll fire one until you have to reload, then switch to the other while the first weapon’s cooldown timer ticks down. It’s not exactly an intuitive system–why is a reload tied to a cooldown timer?–but managing the availability of your weapons and their effectiveness against particular enemies makes for fun second-to-second decision making, especially as you’re faced with further choices on where to focus your attacks. Will your defenses slow down the enemies on the east side long enough for you to mop of the wave coming from the west? When you get into the rhythm of defense, Fortified can be pretty satisfying.
They’ll never know what hit ‘em
But there’s not a lot of content to keep that rhythm going. The campaign has twelve levels that will take about six hours to conquer the first time through, and your options from there are either to replay those levels on a harder difficulty or move into the unending waves of the Invasion mode, though that only has three maps of its own. And the game’s general lack of depth means that you’re going to be feeling the repetition long before you have to start repeating content. My preferred character was way below the level cap and had tons of new defenses to unlock, but I’d already found the suite of options that worked for me and was successfully and easily defending my bases with those four-ish options, so I didn’t feel much desire to keep using those same strategies again and again on harder difficulties.
Only about four of these things ever mattered for me
The game supports up to four players online. My time playing with others, both friends and strangers, was technically flawless, with no noticeable lag or connection issues. The game appears to scale its enemies for multiple players by simply increasing their health, so baddies that go down in one shot during single-player might take a whole clip with four players on the field. It’s a solution that works well enough, but it makes all the weapons feel a lot weaker by comparison.
FORTIFIED VERDICT
Fortified is a lot like the pulp adventures that inspired it: fun while it lasts but lacking in depth and ultimately forgettable. There’s nothing particularly novel about it–it’s a riff on Orcs Must Die or Dungeon Defenders in a different setting–but its doofy adherence to 50s pulp-heroism gives it enough charm that I mostly enjoyed my time with it. For better or worse, that’s Fortified’s most defining feature. Unfortunately, its tower-defense half fails to offer compelling strategic options, and that lack of depth, compounded by the lack of content, keeps the game from having much lasting appeal.
TOP GAME MOMENT
Watching the final boss helplessly fall before the might of an unbroken line of anti-air emplacements and my incendiary shotgun.
Good vs Bad
- Solid rendition of the 50s pulp sci-fi aesthetic
- Solid moment-to-moment action
- Lack of strategy and depth on the tower-defense side
- Few levels and modes
