Tower Madness

TowerMadness is a 3D Tower Defense Game for the iPod Touch and the iPhone, developed by Limbic Software. In it, evil Grey aliens are trying to steal your beloved sheep and turn them into a scarf for their new emperor!

Your objective: Build towers to blast, zap and fry them to death before they can steal all of your sheep!

This game has maps which have both fixed and dynamic paths for the alien mooks, providing a fun and addicting experience for players. It also has online score uploads, allowing players to "compete" with each other in score.

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This game provides examples of:

• Airborne Mook: Flying aliens fit the bill — they fly over all your towers, and are immune to ground towers. In the maps where you are required to redirect the alien's path, these traits can make them Demonic Spiders.
• Aliens Steal Sheep - The aliens in this game are trying to steal your sheep so that they can make a new scarf for their emperor.
• Anti-Air: The Flak turret. Only attacks flying aliens, but damn, they do a good job at it. Especially the final upgrade, which does more damage than the level 3 flamethrower!
• Asteroids Monster: Split aliens. When defeated, they split up into two regular aliens. Thankfully, the split alien and the aliens it splits into don't have as much health as a regular alien of the same difficulty, so they are very easily dispatched with Herd Hitting Attacks. Better still, these things give out quite a nice sum of money for building your turrets!
• Attack of the 50 Foot Whatever: The King Mooks are either 50-foot tall greys or 50-foot long cockroaches.
• Awesome but Impractical: The homing missile towers. These towers have the best range in the game, fire rapidly at high levels, do rather good damage in the early game, and can cause splash damage. However, they get weaker and weaker as time goes on, making you have to rely on the more Boring but Practical weapons like the mortar.
  • The final upgrade for them subverts it, though.
  • Electroshock towers also count: They do HUGE damage at the start of the game, and also hits a chain of enemies. However, they do not do that much against bosses, and the damage gets quite weak later as the enemies get harder.
• Big Bad: The Grey Emperor.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Crittasaurs are oversized cockroaches from space. They kind of act as trained animals for The Greys, and are the fastest unit.
  • The Crittasaur King is a literally a 50-foot long cockroach, and it's insanely fast and durable, making it a Demonic Spider for most players. The in-game manual even tells you to "Look out for the Crittasaur King in later levels."
• Bedsheet Ghost: Ghost Aliens.
• Boss Rush: Happens at the end of every level — the game throws pretty much every King Mook at you. Unfortunately, that includes Flying, Regenerative and Crittasaur Kings...
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: The flamethrower is the best weapon in the game, especially the upgraded version (which is a Game Breaker). In order to use it in-game, however, you have to buy it online with real money.
  • Same goes for the Proxy Mine and the Flash Bait.
• Chain Lightning: The ElectroShock tower sends out electric shocks that can travel through a chain of enemies.
• Circling Birdies: The aliens get this when they get stunned by the upgraded forms of the Plasmatron.
• Crippling Overspecialization: The Armoured Aliens, which come in three kinds. Each one of them is resistant to one type of damage, but take more damage from the other two kinds!
  • Light armoured aliens resist half the damage from energy weapons, but take more damage from explosives and electrical shocks.
  • Heavy armoured aliens suffer half damage from explosives, but receive extra damage from electrical and energy weapons.
  • Bionic armoured aliens take one-third the damage from electrical shocks, but get badly damaged by energy weapons and explosives.
  • The final upgrade for the Homing Missile Towers ignores all this- it does normal damage to all three kinds of armoured units.
• Crutch Character: Homing Missile Towers- they do good damage in the early game, are able to attack flying aliens, have splash damage, excellent range and fire rapidly at max upgrade, but later on their damage starts to suck against the more powerful enemies which will shrug them off. Of course, you can still use Death of a Thousand Cuts for them...
  • Lampshaded in the game's weapon manual- the "Bang for Buck" (aka damage dealt each second per cost) of these towers actually decreases as they are upgraded.
  • And then the final upgrade for the Homing Missiles puts them under Awesome Yet Practical- they do more damage per second then Nukes, and can attack from half the screen...
  • The Electroshock tower. See the "Awesome but Impractical" section above.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Since the version 1.5 update, the positioning of the flamethrower on the tower select option has changed. Many people select the mine option which took its place instead.
• Death in All Directions: The map "Sudden Death". You have 1 sheep. And the enemies attack you unhindered from ALL directions. Good luck, you'll need it.
• Demonic Cockroaches: Crittasaurs. These giant alien cockroaches are the fastest unit in the game, and are surprisingly durable for a speedy enemy. The King Mook version of these is even faster, and can take a lot of damage, making it a definite Demonic Cockroach.
  • Flying aliens, especially in later waves, will fly over many of your turrets. While this isn't an issue at the first half of waves (just use an Anti-Air and watch them go down), they will require at least two fully upgraded flak turrets to take down a wave later.
  • Regenerative Aliens are, well, aliens that can regenerate health. While not too hard to kill if slowed, their King Mook version of them can be quite a problem, especially when it regenerates health at a faster rate. You'll definitely be going "Why Won't You Die?" when facing these.
• Difficult but Awesome: Railguns are slow and have incredibly high upgrade costs- the final Railgun upgrade costs 2250 points- but once you have the final level of the railgun up, aliens will go down like nothing.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Greys are just trying to steal sheep to get some wool for a scarf. You respond by blowing them up, frying them, electrocuting them, and even nuking them!
• Excuse Plot: Evil aliens are trying to steal your sheep and turn them into a scarf for their emperor! Are you a bad enough dude to... protect your sheep?
• Foregone Conclusion: Pick an Endless mode. Any endless mode...
• Freud Was Right: The penultimate upgrade to the Plasmatron looks like... a man's reproductive organ, complete with two "balls", at least from a bird's eye view.
• Game Breaker: The Flamethrower weapon. At level 2, it burns through enemies, including King Mooks, with relative ease. At level 3, almost nothing survives. To balance it, they come at a high cost, have even higher upgrade costs, have a long purchase time and even longer upgrade times, and you have to buy them online if you want to use them in-game.
• The Greys: Your enemies are these — the standard, run-of-the-mill Mook is even called "Grey Alien".
• Healing Factor: Regenerative aliens, as their namesake suggests, heal over time. Use an Electroslow tower to slow them and their regenerative process.
• Infinity+1 Sword: The level 3 flamethrower. That is all.
• Kill It with Fire: The laser weapon and the flamethrower heat up enemies and do double damage to fully heated ones.
• King Mook: Basically, boss opponents, which are larger and much harder to kill versions of regular enemies. They (usually) even wear a crown on their heads! If you do make it to the end of a wave, the Grey Emperor himself comes after you.
• Lightning Bruiser: Despite being fast, Crittasaurs are not fragile- they can take about as much damage as the average Grey. The Crittasaur King can take as much damage as a regular boss Mook, and travel even faster than the regular crittasaurs!
• Magikarp Power: The Homing Missile turrets. As they get upgraded, its dps-for-cost gets lower and lower, making it Awesome but Impractical. Then the Final Upgrade throws it back to Awesome Yet Practical by giving it a very high dps rate, decent splash range, and the ability to attack mooks from across half the screen! It also does 100% damage to all armoured aliens, meaning that it is not even resisted by the Heavy Armoured Aliens!
• Magnetic Weapons: A railgun weapon is present in the game. It can shoot through multiple Mooks for high damage, but comes at a high buying and upgrade cost.
• Marathon Level: The "Endurance" level is a named version, but any level over 300 waves is this (Undulation, Dione)
• No Sell: Ghost Aliens are completely immune to all fire attacks. This was probably done so that people wouldn't completely rely on the Level 3 flamethrower.
• Nuke'Em: The Nuke weapon, the final upgrade of the mortar. It does a lot of damage to a large area of enemies.
• Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in the Future: Due to a graphic rendering error in version 1.4, the level 2 upgrade for the flamethrower got turned to a coloured box... of DOOM. Fixed in version 1.5.
• The Paralyzer: The upgrades for the Plasmatron give it the chance to stun aliens that it hits, making them unable to move for a second or two. Not very useful on regular enemies as it doesn't have that good of a fire rate. However, it is priceless against King Mooks, especially when it can stop the extremely fast and durable Crittasaur King dead in its tracks.
  • The Flash Bait is an even better example- it doesn't do any damage, but it attracts all enemies towards it, then when they get near, it explodes, paralyzing them for quite a bit of time AND slowing them down even longer after that.
• Recycled in Space: There's a new Moon-themed map. One of which is a Shout-Out to Space Invaders.
• Ridiculously-Fast Construction: The towers are like these. Although the construction time does increase progressively when upgrading a tower to higher levels.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Played straight- the Mooks get harder to defeat after each wave. At at the end of a level, a Boss Rush awaits, with the Grey Emperor himself at the end. Not to mention that he can take A LOT of damage...
• Sure Why Not: The fans of Tower Madness requested for a level 3 upgrade to the already powerful flamethrower, as well as a space themed map. Guess what version 1.5 came with? Both of them!
  • Fans complained that the flak cannon's final upgrade did less damage than the level 3 flamethrower, as such being useless. So the Devs gave the flak gun an upgrade which surpassed the level 3 flamethrower in both damage per second AND range.
• That One Boss: Crittasaur Kings!!! Especially in fixed placement levels. In dynamic placement levels, the Flying Alien king fits the bill.
• That One Level: Any level where the aliens attack from all sides of the map. Such as "Giza".
  • The level called "Endurance". If you have the flamethrower and use the right strategy, you'll do just fine without losing a single sheep. Then comes the Boss Rush at the end... AAAAAAAARGH!!! FLYING AND CRITTASAUR ALIEN KINGS!!!
  • Now we have "Sudden Death". You have 1 sheep in the center of the field, and there are 6 places where the aliens spawn, all on the borders of the map. Good luck trying to deal with Death in All Directions...
• Video Game Lives: In the form of sheep, no less.
• Video Game Settings:
  • Big Boo's Haunt: Spooky.
  • Bubblegloop Swamp: Marsh Madness.
  • Green Hill Zone: First Encounters.
  • Lethal Lava Land: Lava.
  • Remilitarized Zone: The newer levels of Trial By Fire.
  • Shifting Sand Land: Wind and Sand.
  • Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Brewing Storm.
  • Space Zone: Moon.
• Why Won't You Die?: In fixed placement maps, you'll be saying this for the King Mooks at later waves. In dynamic placement maps, King Fliers.
• Your Size May Vary: The regular Mooks come in multiple sizes- human sized, 2x human size, 3x human size, or 4x human size. The King Mooks are all 50 feet tall/wide.