Overview: Desktop Defender is The Casual Collective’s Facebook version of Desktop Tower Defense. It’s quite similar to the original Flash game, but there are a number of changes, additions, and extensions that make Desktop Defender worth trying out even if you’ve played DTD.

Like the Flash version, Desktop Defender is a tower defense game – that is, you have a playing field on which you place towers, and opponents that stream across the field. Proper placement of the right kinds of towers slows and shoots down the creeps. The biggest difference between this version and Desktop Tower Defense is the idea of persistence. In DTD, you play a game, that’s it – it’s over. In Desktop Defender, winning earns you coins, which you can spend to unlock more advanced towers and upgrades for those towers, and Boosters, which are temporary effects that you can use to give you an advantage or get yourself out of a jam. This leads to the interesting dynamic that even if you are totally familiar with the game, you can keep playing to unlock different tricks and keep things changed up, which is definitely an improvement on the original.

The game is structured around the Weekly Challenge, which is a specific map that everyone can take a crack at and compare scores with their friends. There are also a variety of maps to play with outside the challenge (many of which require you to give your email,) and a few special challenges, like the Flood, where the creeps come in from the edges in huge swarms and try to reach a single tile in the middle. This is also a way to keep the game relatively fresh, and it’s nice to be able to throw out some of the fixed “rules” about maze-building to try something new.

Desktop Defender is just like its predecessor in that the review took at least six hours longer to write than it should have, as “I just need to grab a screenshot” turned into “Hmm, what if I started like this, could I break 10,00 points?” over and over. So, fair warning – it’s addictive and fun as anything. The social aspects – comparing scores, getting a coin allotment based on the number of friends playing, etc – add to the game rather than distracting from it, and the persistent scoring and accumulation of power-ups make the game somewhat less pure, perhaps, but definitely more replayable. Highly recommended to people with lots of time to spare.