Free Game Of The Moment: Cursed Treasure

With all the garbage masquerading as Flash games out there, it can be tough to find a good time-waster. Russian developer IriySoft's latest tower defense variant, Cursed Treasure, is a glittering diamond in the rough. I haven't had this much fun with a free tower defense since Desktop Tower Defense.

Cursed Treasure looks like a typical set-path TD at first glance, and in some ways it is. Like most TD games, it's puzzle-like in that there is an optimal solution to each wave and each level. Cursed Treasure makes this more explicit by only having three tower types, each of which can only be built on one type of ground. "High Ground" tiles are wild cards that allow any type of tower, and give a 50% range boost. Proscribing players' actions in this way results in a far tighter game than typically found in Flash TDs.

The usual gold loop is present, where you collect cash by killing monsters to build more towers to kill more creeps. Towers also gain experience, which ends up being a key part of surviving harder levels. Your final resource is mana, which is gained over time depending on how many mana node squares (which are set on each level; some have none while others have several) you build towers on.

Mana can be spent on one of three spells. Meteor Shower costs 150, and is the most immediately impressive: 200 damage to everything in a wide radius, which is enough to kill almost any non-boss creep. Frenzy triples all your towers' attack speeds for five seconds for 200 mana, and the descriptively named Cut Out takes 100 mana to chop down a forest to allow a tower to be built on a square.

You'll discover that Meteor Shower is a horrible waste of mana most of the time. Experience is usually the most valuable resource, and blowing up mobs with the spell denies your towers the experience for shooting at them. You see, upgrading towers does more than just increase their damage. 

At fourth level, each tower can specialize one of two ways. This is where a huge part of the game's strategy takes place. Temples can upgrade their rapid-fire laser to also weaken its target to other towers' attacks, or dramatically change their attack into a slow pulse that damages everything nearby. Upgraded towers are far more effective than basic ones. Managing which towers get experience and unlock their upgrades fastest is a key element of the game.

Cursed Treasure also lets you specialize yourself along three paths, each of which correspond to a tower type. Each path gives a 50% experience boost to that tower type at high levels, which is absolutely crucial to besting the game's harder levels.

My personal favorite thing about Cursed Treasure, though, is that it doesn't have the interest mechanic on unspent gold like so many TDs. I hate win-more (or rich-get-richer, to put it another way) mechanics like that. The one plus of the interest mechanic is that it makes you try to ride the line of most efficiently protecting your base. Cursed Treasure achieves a similar reward for excellence in between-level experience game and mission ratings. I much prefer keeping that sort of thing in the metagame, rather than tying it to a core game mechanic like gold.

Cursed Treasure has many fewer decisions to make than most TDs, but they're more interesting. Fire off a Frenzy now to deal with ninjas, or save it for the boss that's coming a few waves later? Put a Crypt on this high ground to cover more area, or concentrate firepower in a smaller range with a Den? Upgrade this Den to a Ballista for awesome splash damage, or make it an Orcish Den for insta-gibbing critical strikes?

This is definitely my favorite free game of the moment. Check back tomorrow to see what my favorite $0 spent on iPhone software this week is.