By Anthony Swinnich on May 17th, 2008

Defend Your Castle’s premise is simply laid out in its name: You have castle, so defend it. As the invaders approach the construction-paper portcullis, it’s up to you to send them packing. When the game begins your opposition will be no more than button-headed stick figures who bang the gates with their fists. You can just pick them up with the Wii remote and fling them into the air – they splatter when they hit the ground.

The types of enemies diversify as the game continues. Some of the invaders will show up with popsicle stick battering rams or bombs. Hulking pop-cap headed beasts charge the walls and take several pokes to defeat. The game ramps up the difficultly smoothly by adding a few more enemies per day, slowly adding new infantry for you to battle. The game is intelligent about how it throws enemies at you and it adds to the title’s depth. If a particularly large wave is coming toward your walls and there’s a bomb-soldier (wheeling a round of caps from a cap gun) in the mix, you can detonate it and take out some of the surrounding troops.

It’s also a nice touch that your enemies aren’t the only ones that learn new tricks. Defeating an enemy gives you money that can be spent on upgrades. These upgrades include an archery tower; the ability to deploy your own bomb-wielding soldiers, a magic eraser that will rub an enemy out and a repair tower to heal damage to the walls. These perks can be upgraded by taking enemy soldiers and converting them to your side one at a time, which adds another level of management to battle. As enemy forces crash against your walls, you have to choose when to grab one out of the fray and dip them in your magic paint bucket pit of conversion.

One of the best aspects of the game is playing with a friend, or four of them at the same time. While the main objective is still to protect the castle, the player with the most points at the end of the round is dubbed "king" adding some level of competition. The king has the ability to utilize the power-ups and distribute troops, so if there’s a sizable horde outside the walls, only the king can deploy a bomb-soldier to clear the field.

Describing the characters as "button-headed" or use of the term "popsicle stick battering ram" has nothing to do with metaphorical writing – the enemies are actually made up of arts and craft supplies. Unlike the Flash game which uses Flash graphics, this iteration of Defend Your Castle looks like it was put together by a kindergartner, but in the best way possible. The cottony clouds hang by strings of yarn, and the menus make use of scrabble titles and graph paper. This means the graphics are nowhere near mind-blowing, but the simple aesthetic is charming.

The game is set up like old-school titles where getting the high score is the point, so don’t expect an epic storyline. It’s all about learning to use the resources at hand to get through the day. You can save your progress by the day as you go on, but some of the later days may require multiple tries before you clear them. At only 500 Wii points, that’s really all Defend Your Castle has to be – a simple diversion that’s both tactile and fun, and it succeeds admirably.