Instead of invaders, you have shoppers.

Instead of killing them, you try to take all of their money.

Instead of towers, you build shops.

Instead of protecting an escape route, you have goals (like obtain X amount of Cash, or build specific expensive stores, etc.).

The other major difference from most Tower Defense games is the most key feature of all: You have an AI competitor that will not only place his own stores to compete against yours, but may also try to buy out your stores (and you may buy out theirs too). This lends Shopper’s Paradise an extra layer of strategy that makes it work so well on small maps.

Just like towers, each of the store types has its strengths. Some keep customers busy a long while, while others churn them through revolving doors but take smaller profits per customer. Each store has a maximum capacity, so if it’s full, customers move on. Placement of Movie Theatres are especially important to capture the overflow from other stores and then spit the customers back out into the mall after awhile.

There’s a 3-map free demo available, as well as a $3 complete version. Once I’d completed the demo in Easy, Medium and Hard, I was sold. The full game includes 20 maps plus 4 bonus extra-tricky maps. I’ve played all of them through on Easy and I’m currently working on Medium. There’s enough meat in this game to more than justify the $3 cost. Amongst mountains of mobile game shovelware, this one has really stood out for me.

It’s available for Android and Blackberry. I play the game regularly on my Samsung Galaxy Spica and it runs as smooth as butter. I wish it had a speedup mode (there are two speeds: Normal and Slow) for those maps when you’re done building and just want to see the results, but otherwise I have zero complaints about the game’s design and execution.

I’d love to see a sequel that could perhaps include more complex maps (zoom would be nice), different store upgrade options (maybe the movie theatre could choose 3D or Imax?) and of course multiplayer would be stellar, since this game is currently only single-player.

Kudos to the folks at Second Gear Games for making the best game I’ve played on Android thus far.

Left 4 Dead strikes me as ripe for a Tower Defense mod. It already revolves around defending as gameplay, plus it has waves and waves of not-so-mindless zombies ready to go. The AI director could probably be tweaked for it nicely. If I had the coding skills (or at least more familiar with the SDK), I’d start a mod project, but I don’t so here it is as a suggestion.

It doesn’t have to be Towers, just auto-targetting / auto-killing devices of some sort. I’m imagining all sorts of devilish traps that could be placed in some of the narrow corridors and hallways typical for Left 4 Dead maps. Maybe movable barriers too, so the pathing of the zombies could be altered. Then the glorious gibbing of zombies would abound!

This could end up a little more like Dungeon Keeper than Tower Defense, but that’s great, since I’d count Dungeon Keeper as the epitome of build-and-turtle defense games.