The tower defense genre is pretty awesome, although some may find that it appears to stagnate fairly often. There’s only so many ideas one can inject into the genre, right? Developer Solitude Entertainment hopes to break out of the expected tower defense niche with Hydraulic Empire. Their game, while not entirely unique, puts the focus on mob interactions. What this means is that your different deployable classes interact with each other, as well as with enemies, in distinctive ways. Here’s an example of what this means: The Shifter support unit will readily sacrifice itself to shield/buff the Grunt tank unit. Of course, that’s just one example of many instances set to occur during gameplay.
Also shown was the ability for a tank known as the Swarm Mother to place down a spawn point for Swarmies. Aside from being a bit creepy, it seems like the team has a great batch of ideas for how to make a variety of different mob interactions. My biggest fear at the moment is how difficult it might be to balance everything out if and when they expand beyond the core concepts of Hydraulic Empire. In any case, it’s great to know folks are out there trying to develop the genre in different ways.
Solitude Entertainment are looking to get their game out (nearly) everywhere. If the $8,000 Kickstarter is successful then they plan to bring it to PC, mobile, and consoles. No, specific consoles aren’t discussed. Given the price tag to develop on such platforms that bit may be stretching. In any case, you can vote for Hydraulic Empire on Steam Greenlight now if you’d like to see it hit that digital distributor.
Track the progress of the Hydraulic Empire Kickstarter in our Campaign Calendar.
