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Admittedly, the easy thing to do in a situation like this is to fall back on Yakof Smirnoff’s
famous “In Soviet Russia” bit. But since he’s still actually getting work (albeit
in Branson), it’d be crass and potentially SOPArific of me to carelessly throw around
such a piece of material. Besides, there’s plenty more to talk about in this game. Like
pigs. And... well, pigs. Capitalist pigs. Trying to destroy a rocket.
All Your Creeps is your standard tower defense game, but with significantly more BACON. That’s
right, the assailants in this game - the “creeps,” as it were - are of the porcine persuasion,
though this doesn’t prevent them from coming into battle armed to the teeth with cannons
a’blazin. Four barrels good, two barrels bad, as it were. As is typical for the genre,
there’s a rock/paper/scissors/something else mechanic at play between the various
types of raiding swine and the towers you use to rebuff their attacks. Each side has
four different units to command, replenished at set intervals indicated by the circle around
your targeting reticule.
While it’s a cute idea, All Your Creeps suffers from a rather shallow experience;
there are only two game modes available, a five-minute timed bout and an endless challenge
- and only one stage, a snowy Siberian waste. I half expect Boris and Natalya to clamber
out of a bunker with the keys to the Goldeneye. But, hey, the game’s only a buck. And it
supports up to four players at a time, in any configuration of teams. And if you want
something a little more French than the admittedly hackneyed Russianesque font - I know that’s
not a real word and I don’t care - simply leave the title screen rolling on the credits
through one complete cycle. Your reward for actually taking the time to acknowledge the
folks at Red Button Games for creating this thing? ALL YOUR CREPES. Man, I get hungry
just thinking about it. A beret for every pig, and every pig in a beret! A little bit
of ham with your crepes, it seems. All part of this complete breakfast. Well, that’s
not true. That rocket would have to be an orange tree or something, and one of your
towers would have to be a juicer, which means the capitalist swine would have to send Jack
LaLanne, and that would require necromancers, and pig necromancers scare the bacon right
out of me. Literally. Just think of the danger they could wreak if said conjurations were
retroactive! To say nothing of the toast.
So there you have it. The true terror of Animal Tower. I just had to theorize the second coming
of a fitness legend, while some heavily-armed pigs crash into walls and try to avert a Soviet
missile launch. I love the XBLA indie section just for reasons like this; the most absurd
premises can make their way into the living rooms of thousands if not millions, challenging
their ability to maintain sanity in these trying times. It’s like the video game equivalent
of Monty Python. What’s next? Super Johann Gambolputty Brothers? No One Can Stop The
Spanish Inquisition? The Knights Who Say Ni no Kuni? Ooh, I’ve got it: RED. DEAD. PARROT.