#THE KEEPER OF 4 ELEMENTS 2 FOR FREE#

First impressions are incredibly important, and The Keeper of 4 Elements doesn't make a good one.

Honestly, the early gameplay is, unfortunately, a bland offering. Lets start off with talking about the early gameplay, and how it feels and performs. So with a suitably reduced focus on story, gameplay is clearly the meat of the game. The developers give us a premise of why we are defending the island, and that is all we need. The lack of story really isn't a downside, and if the game presented too much of a story, it would feel artificial, forced even. You just want to sit down, play a simple game, and enjoy yourself. Sometimes, you don't want to delve into a deep story, complex gameplay etc. Popular Tower Defence games of 2010 didn't really have much story, if any, yet were still very popular because of how casual and easy they were to pick up, play, and enjoy. It is nice to have a premise to set up why we are fighting people, but further development into what happens really are quite unnecessary, and the developers realize that. The question is, does this game even need a story? In my opinion, not really. However, you are the defender of the Island and you control the forces of nature the 4 elements, if you will. The Dark Lord invades your island home to find ancient magical secrets for his own nefarious means. The story, from what I have experienced so far, is little more than a premise for the game, and not a driving factor. No audio really stands out as impressive, but none of them are bad by any means. Lightning makes zapping noises, water makes splashes, Tornadoes bring the sound of a crushing wind, it's basically what you'd expect. Apart from that, sound effects are decent. Forcing you to either turn it off or leave it blasting is a bad choice, and can ruin any atmosphere the game could have had. Why is this such an issue? Well obviously the music is meant to compliment the theme of the game, and can really make things more intense and immersive. It's off or on, no options to maybe put it to 25% or anything like that.

So, of course I went to the settings menu to turn the audio down and… there was no volume slider. The main menu music is a force to be reckoned with, and the enemy of eardrums everywhere. Even though I had my audio balance set all the way to party so I could hear my friends, the game was so loud I could hear nothing else.

Firstly, I first started this game up when I was in a party chat with a few friends. Using this same graphical style, even though the technology is much better, shows a nice amount of restraint from the developers. They were made and published on websites that aimed for easily accessible games, and having simple graphics meant that they could be ran simply and easily within the browser. Tower Defence games never used to be graphically heavy because of how they were made. In my opinion, if the graphics had been amped-up to suit the power of the PS4, it would have broken some of the immersion for me. This was a good choice, as Tower Defence games are known for not being too graphically intense. It's very simple and colourful, using basic shaders and simple character models. So the first thing that hits you straight away is the graphical style.

#THE KEEPER OF 4 ELEMENTS 2 FOR FREE#

You can purchase The Keeper of 4 Elements for £3.29 on the Playstation Store, or play for free at Kongregate. The Keeper of 4 Elements brings back that same genre into the modern gaming era, but, does it stand the test of time? Lets find out. The gaming industry has changed massively in the past 6 years, and Tower Defence games have really fallen by the wayside. I remember sitting in school during Information Technology lessons, playing Bloons Tower Defence, trying desperately to hide the game window behind the 'work' I was pretending to do. Personally, I have fond memories of games in the Tower Defence genre. With the emergence of the hugely popular Bloons Tower Defence games on gaming websites such as Newground, Kongregate etc, it was no surprise that this genre of game became a hit amongst the casual gamers of that era. Tower Defence games used to be very popular in 2009/2010. So the first question we must ask is, what exactly is The Keeper of 4 Elements? Well, in simple terms, it is a wave-based tower defence game.

The keeper of 4 elements 2