A fantastic game. The tower defense aspect of it is thorough and well-planned and the difficulty of each mission has a good pace. Missions usually require an attempt to strategize on the normal difficulty, and towards the end demand it, and there is a difficulty slider in-game to meet your expectations.

The music of the game is good. It is mostly an orchestral soundtrack which suits the stage of the game and despite having only one mission song, it never tires or feels grating. The main menu music is a completely different tone, a version of a jazz / 50-60s song made to sound as if played through either a gramophone or old turntable, which is a fantastic choice that makes the player feel isolated from the world of each mission, on a plane above everything he's seeing - which is the truth.

The visuals of the game are phenomenal. The visual effects rendered on the 2D space in each mission are impressive technically and visually and enhance the setting of the game marvelously. The information menus are made to resemble old computer screen renderings and work phenomenally at setting the tone of the world outside each mission - the world your player is supposed to occupy.

The story of the game is what makes it a masterpiece. Earth has free access to space. The universe has come up with ways to travel quickly through space, by entering a higher dimension, akin to hyperspace travel or a wormhole. An invasion of an alien force, the Bavakh, forces Earth to come up with a new technology that can send the conscious into a plane even higher - "path space," named so because every motion across space has been reduced to a linear time sequence, a line. You are chosen to enter pathspace and you leave behind your wife and daughter. The masterpiece story here is not in this setup - although it a great setup to incorporate the player into the game world, as he is already above the story - but in the events that unfold as you play the game.

In pathspace, you find you are not the first. You meet another "defender" - someone trapped in pathspace like yourself - named Aa. Aa befriends you, treats you as his underling, and show you the ropes of using aspects of your being to defeat those below path space. You learn that your body is keeping you in pathspace. Soon, you are fighting the Bavakh invasion together and Aa finds you his equal, gleefully. You then assist Aa to fight off the Bavakh coming for his own planet. And during this you begin to distance yourself from Aa, as your attention is split between Earth and Aa's planet. Aa becomes angsty and grows sad finding his one friend spending so much time away from him. And so, he tries to get you to abandon Earth, repeatedly. He tries to get you to allow the Bavakh to siege the Earth, to instead focus on Aa's planet. And by the end of your defense against the Bavakh, Aa convinces one of the Bavakh to send their planet destroyers towards Earth instead of to Aa's planet. And he succeeds.

Earth is destroyed. Time passes. You believe your body and family are gone. But you receive a call from people still alive on Earth - your granddaughter is calling you. She tells you they managed to escape and brought your body along. And so you set out to destroy Aa. Aa has made good with the Bavakh and tries to use them to stop you. But, you kill Bavakh after Bavakh and finally manage your way to Aa's planet, him taunting and hating you the entire way there and you learning from your granddaughter that your people are using nanotechnology to live forever and restore the Earth. And once you find yourself before his ceremonial ship, you destroy it and with it you destroy the hope of every person on Aa's planet. But despite destroying Aa's body he is still alive. And Aa reveals a sudden realization: those in pathspace can never return to their body. It was useless to keep it. The only way out is to choose to die. And so Aa fades, having been unable to defend. Thus ends the first three chapters of the game.

Already, a masterpiece. And the events that follow this are no less intriguing and compelling. If you've noticed, this game is in the "schizocore games list" that I have linked on the front page. And it belongs there, not just because of its aesthetic and its early story that I have written out above, but because it then devolves and explores the concepts of truth and reality from your position as mute path defender and picks at the motivation for the actions of the player - defending, i.e. playing a tower defense game - which can be extrapolated to generally the motivation for any action. It is definitely a satisfying discussion and analysis and its contained only to the last chapter of the game.

No matter who you are, you should try this game. Even if you suck at it, you can turn down the difficulty.