Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

One of this week’s new WiiWare games is the distressingly titled Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord. Although positioned as a sequel to one of WiiWare’s first downloadable games (My Life as a King), My Life as a Darklord does not have much to do with the original. It’s more of a thematic sister, part of the Crystal Chronicles family tree. The game sells for $10, or 1000 magic happy plus points.

Darklord is a tower defender that stands the concept on its head (literally), featuring the daughter of the big bad from My Life as a King, as well as the familiar Final Fantasy-lite cast of characters. Tonberries, Selkies, etc. Reminiscent of one of my old favorites, Dungeon Keeper, the point here is to build a tower full of enemies and kill off all the invading heroes. Taking advantage of the Final Fantasy look, My Life is a Darklord comes off as very polished and complete… even if Square Enix plans to douse us with DLC “upgrades” by the metric ton.

Here’s what makes it unique (although I certainly have not played every tower defense game out there, so you guys tell me if I’ve been duped). Rather than placing attack points along an enemy path, you build a giant tower of rooms leading straight up. The heroes blindly start marching up the tower, room by room, and your job is to kill them before they get to the top. If any hero makes it to the top of your tower – which is capped by a giant frivolous evil heart – it’s game over and you have been a most sucky Darklord.

You build your tower with different types of rooms, each with localized effects to help your monsters and hinder the heroes. Then you fill the rooms with creatures and wait for somebody to walk in. When a hero arrives, the overall effect is a cute little classic Final Fantasy homage… your monsters and the hero all take turns swiping near each other as life meters decrease and damage numbers float away. Even as a guy who never really ventured through a core Final Fantasy game, I can appreciate the nostalgic nod.

The entire game pauses as you build rooms, which strikes me as quite unusual for a tower defender and maybe even a little hurtful. Seems like it may be too easy to just pause and think about your strategy, although of course this makes My Life as a Darklord VERY approachable for gamers new to the tower defense concept.

So far, FFCC:MLAAD looks like it is going to become one of my favorite WiiWare games. If Square Enix reskinned this as part of the Kingdom Hearts franchise, with Heartless enemies and Disney Villain-related trinkets, I would re-buy again in an instant.

Incidentally, thanks to the Pepsi Rock Band deal, I got my 1000 Wii Points (=$10) on the backs of five bottles of Pepsi. Actual out-of-pocket expense on Darklord: $6.75 plus tax. And with the bonus of 100 fl. oz. of Pepsi Max down the gullet.