Defendin' De Penguin

Defendin' De Penguin (stylized as DeFenDin' De PenGuin) is a 2008 real-time strategy tower-defense game developed by Brain Toys and published by Crave Entertainment in North America, and was published by FunBoxMedia in PAL regions for the Nintendo DS and Wii. It is the first real-time strategy game released for the latter console.

Gameplay
A penguin named Little Blue must defend his hometown from various sea creatures who are willing to steal his town's fish supply by strategically placing tower-defense mechanisms throughout each level, with the help of his Professor and as well as his girlfriend, Penny. (starting in Map/World 2)

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The concept of the game is pretty nice on paper, as it's a tower-defense game where a penguin must defend his hometown from hungry creatures, with RTA elements mixed in, however, it's somewhat poorly executed here, and it's not a very good way to start the genre of RTA games on the Wii.
 * 2) Pretty poor graphics, even for both 2008 and Wii/DS standards, as they look akin to a Nintendo 64 game. Other Wii games that were released the same year (excluding shovelware ones) look better in comparison.
 * 3) The gameplay can get extremely repetitive, but also boring. The game lets you set up little to no towers in levels, and barely lets you upgrade them either, even when it's required in order to defeat tougher enemies.
 * 4) While you can do other things other than watching the towers kill all of the enemies for you, such as fishing and collecting coins/items that enemies drop once they're defeated, it's not warranted anyway, as in the tutorial, the Professor says that the town only needs one fish to survive.
 * 5) The controls are also poorly implemented, and can sometimes be unresponsive, especially on the Wii version. In order to move Little Blue anywhere, you have to press the B button THEN the A button, you can't really press both at the same time.
 * 6) * In order to go fishing, you have to do the aforementioned action: Press B and then A on the Wii Remote. Sometimes, this doesn't work.
 * 7) Power-ups that you can collect for Little Blue are useless and don't really add all that much to the gameplay. While there are some that might be useful, such as speed boots that make Little Blue run faster, it still doesn't help.
 * 8) Some enemies have too much health and can be difficult to kill.
 * 9) Repetitive, on-loop music, as it's just one song for each map. (There are 5 maps in the game that each have 10 levels)
 * 10) Very little replay value, as the game only allows you to play through an entire map again, rather than a certain level in a map.
 * 11) The cutscenes are very lazily made, even more lazy than the cutscenes from Sonic Free Riders, as it's just still images of the characters (which never change) talking with speech bubbles in front of a PNG Antarctica background, which also never changes.
 * 12) For some reason, on the PAL box art, Little Blue looks completely different from the North American one.

Good Qualities

 * 1) Both the NTSC and PAL box arts look pretty well done, and are decently rendered.
 * 2) Thankfully, you do not have to defeat all of the enemies in order to win, allowing you to complete levels quicker, although, this does lower your score.
 * 3) Decent soundtrack, despite being repetitive.
 * 4) The game can actually be challenging for its target audience, which is mainly children.
 * 5) The concept of the game is pretty interesting, at least, despite the somewhat poor execution.
 * 6) Despite all of the problems listed above, some people may still find some bit of enjoyment in the game.

Reception
The game currently has a 67% on Metacritic via 4 critic reviews, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. But has a user score of 8.5 based on 6 ratings. While some aspects of the game were praised, such as the game actually being quite challenging, and is not only the first RTA game on the Wii, but is also the first one in general to be aimed at children, due to most RTA games being aimed at more mature audiences, the game was also criticized for it’s repetitive and boring gameplay, poor graphics, etc.

Videos
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