Sleep Attack – PC Review – by Selthor

Genre: Casual Indie Strategy Tower Defense
Developer: Bad Seed
Publisher: Plug In Digital
Release Date: May 28, 2015

Sleep Attack is the second title released by developer Bad Seed, and published by Plug In Digital. Bad Seed, an Italian startup founded in 2014, is also known for their other game on Steam – The Beggar’s Ride, which was self-published. The Beggar’s Ride has the same concept as Sleep Attack of manipulating the surrounding world. Plug In Digital, on the other hand, has published quite a few games on Steam, some of which being Epistory and Splasher.

The game is a basic tower defense game with the twist that instead of moving the objective around for each level, and having static lanes that creeps come down, Sleep Attack gives you control to rotate parts of the environment while the objective you are defending is in the center. This change actually makes this a much more active tower defense game, because you are not given the resources in a typical map to defend all approaches effectively causing you to be juggling upgrading towers, moving parts of the map, placing new towers, and using abilities. All the while you also have enemies occasionally dropping extra coins to click to collect, and occasional flying squids that grant you cash for clicking and holding them to squeeze coins from them. When you complete levels the points you score are given to you in the game’s currency which is spent to purchase abilities, either while in the level select screen, or on the fly in the maps themselves.

The towers, enemies (except for one in particular), and abilities themselves are not particularly special – if you’ve played a few tower defense games you’ll have seen them all. The monster that stands out is a puffy purple sheep that, if it reaches your base, awards you with a bonus life point, but if killed damages you. Though the towers do not stand out for types, they do still stand out in one way, their looks – the art aesthetic of this game is amazing. The towers range from a mouth that spits at the enemies, to a tower that, to me, looks like a Tesla coil that is emitting dubstep instead of electricity, and to go with that their look changes as you upgrade them, the mouth gains more teeth and the Tesla coil gains more rings.

The first enemy you encounter looks like a walking banana wearing a mask, later you encounter green and red boars, and big black ogres. The backgrounds themselves are varied in appearance as well so, you’re not staring at the same screen while playing. The “structure” you are defending is the sleeping form of a three eyed monster that seems to be dreaming the entire game after falling asleep playing what looked like Space Invader. The music doesn’t detract from the game, though it doesn’t do much to enhance it either.

The music was an issue for me at first because it is very loud and the game’s only options for the music is to mute it, there are no in game volume controls. The rest of the game’s options are limited to selecting full screen or windowed mode, with a variety of resolutions for windowed mode. The resolutions range from 800×600 to 1600×900, and all seemed to be locked at 60 Hz excluding 1154×864, which is set at 75 Hz.

Selthor gives Sleep Attack a Drastik Measure 8 out of 10 (80).

Pros:

• Great new change to a genre growing stale
• Great art aesthetic

Cons:

• No volume controls

I would recommend this game to any fan of the tower defense genre, while I would recommend those new to the genre to maybe play an old standard such as Gemcraft first to get a feel for the genre before jumping into this game. Sleep Attack is available on Steam for $6.99 USD.