Indie virtual reality (VR) developer HandyGames currently has two titles on Steam Early Access, both of which you play a powerful overseer. But while Townsmen VR casts you as a god trying to protect and nurture a civilisation, today’s gameplay video looks at the other, much darker title Devil and the Fairy. This casts you as a reawakened demon who needs to protect his dungeons from invading heroes.
A wave-based tower defence style experience, Devil and the Fairy puts you in command of goblin troops to defend your dungeon whilst having access to a selection of defences to slow down and injure the invading forces. As you’ll see from the video, the Early Access title has three levels available at present – one of which is locked until you successfully complete the others – and they certainly don’t make it easy from the outset.
Currently the videogame seems to be setup for right-handed players with the inventory opening up on the left hand, whilst the right does all the picking and positioning. To begin with there’s only a couple of inventory items available in each class. So you have a standard goblin who does melee damage plus a goblin shaman that shoots magic at range. On the defensive side there’s a barricade and some floor spikes. None of these can be put down haphazardly has you only have so much magical energy. Once depleted you can either wait for it to recharge – very slowly – or start looking around the level to smash things up. Boxes, jars, barrels, basically anything that looks breakable might well be, unleashing more magic or possibly all manner of other items to help your troops.
VRFocus previewed Devil and the Fairy last week: “If you like a good tower defence videogame and don’t mind Early Access titles then Devil and the Fairy is certainly an interesting choice. With decent visuals, a solid control scheme and some cheeky humour through out, there’s plenty to like.”
Though for the title thought of as the ‘father’ of the genre you have travel forward eleven years to Bullfrog’s classic original Populous videogame. Led through development by Peter Molyneux, who would later revisit the genre much later with his arguably failed title Godus.
