Army of Darkness: Defense

This is a tower defense game patterned after the third movie in Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy, 1992's cult hit Army of Darkness. The Macguffin to be protected here is the sinister grimoire the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, protected behind lock and key in the keep of a medieval castle. Besieging the castle are 50 waves of demonic Deadites, evil undead soldiers armed with various offensive and defensive siege armaments. And leading the keep's defense is our hero, the films' time-travelling protagonist Ash Williams, who runs hither and thither along the castle's grounds leading groups of noble and peasant defenders and personally attending to the Deadite vanguard by crushing them with his robotic hand (later slicing them with the chainsaw affixed to his stump) or blasting them with his boomstick.

A typical round begins with Ash on the book end of the castle, invaders entering, several screens away, from the other end, and no other defenders deployed. The blacksmith stands at attention at his forge, slowly producing iron, which is used to commission troops of various kinds, including peasants, swordsmen, spearmen and archers, among other rarer, more specialised and more expensive heroes and troop-enhancing units. Producing units is a strategic choice, as stockpiling iron can allow an upgrade of the blacksmith to a higher level of production, consuming current stores of iron but creating it more quickly. Enemies can be dispatched both by ranged and melee attacks, and may drop both iron and money upon expiring. The iron can be put to immediate use training more defenders, while the gold is used between waves to upgrade Ash's stats, to purchase more varied and more powerful levels of his two timed special attacks, to unlock new and more powerful versions of castle defense units, and to purchase passive defensive equipment like catapults which attack approaching enemies without being at any risk of falling to them.

Nearly every unit type is represented on both sides, and Ash will face off against numerous foes pulled directly (along with lots of voice clips) from the reels of the film, including the Deadite crone, Bad Ash, a troika of miniature Ash imps, and the possessed body of his love interest.