Preview by: Toni Schwartz

Tower defense-style games have always been great little game morsels during lunch breaks, in between studying for exams, before checking email, or whenever you have some time to kill. The problem with tower defense games, like many so-called casual games, is that they’re so damn addictive that you inevitably spend way more time than you anticipated playing them. Ten minutes quickly turns into an hour as you meticulously plot every move like a general prepares for a battle.

Doublesix has thrown its hat into the tower defense ring with a game set in the South Park universe. With the amusingly Japlish-sounding title South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense Play!, your goals are no different from standard TD games. Waves of enemies from one end of the map will try to cross to the other side to destroy whatever’s there, e.g. the elementary school. You’re tasked to kill the invaders before they reach those areas by setting up defenses at various points on the map.

The twist though, is that while most TD games are set up more like board games, with players placing towers throughout the map, in South Park you also actively participate by controlling one of the famous foulmouthed four: Cartman, Kyle, Stan, and Kenny. You can unlock 11 other characters later such as Butters, Tweek, Jimmy, and Wendy. Naturally there’s a multiplayer option, in which you and three other people can play co-op locally or via XBLA. There are 11 stages with two or three levels in each stage.

Being that it’s based on South Park, the game features the same biting, twisted humor found in the animated series. For example, the towers include laser stands, baseball pitching machines, and oh – a cat pee tower. During the demo I was on a junkyard map playing as Stan, frantically hurling snowballs at waves of Underpants Gnomes, only one of many kinds of familiar characters from the show. Other enemies include Ginger Kids, cows, and Hippies. When I held down the A button, I was able to throw the more powerful yellow snowballs. Yum. Unfortunately at one point I got too close to a wave and was killed.