Protector is Tower Defense strategy RPG flash game, which has a bare bones story. The land is under attack, and it is up to you to set up defenses to make sure enemies don't make it through. That's pretty much it, but it is all you need to give you a world map and serves as a reason for the meat of the game; the strategy. A few easy maps are available to play from the outset. As you complete maps, more of the world becomes available to explore and play. Therefore you don't need to play them in a specific order, though you will likely want to finish all the easy maps before moving onto medium ones, and finish those before moving onto the hard ones.
The brains on the other side of the map must be more tasty than those of your mages.
Once you start a map, you survey the isometric grid, figure out where to place your men on any available tiles, and start hiring troops with your starting gold. There are 5 basic unit types; the 4 mages are virtually identical, except for their elemental alignment and specials (more on those later), while Dexers are the fighters, who have less range and can't hit flying enemies, but have more raw power. Once you are ready, you can launch the first wave, and have the enemy run along a set course through the map (sometimes through multiple entry and exit points), getting blasted by your mages or hacked by your Dexers. Your troops gain experience points based on how much damage they deal (not on kills), and you gain gold for each enemy killed. Should an enemy make it through your defenses, you lose a life. The amount of lives you have differs on each map, and if you lose them all, you have to start the map again.
Once the first wave is over, you can hire more troops, or if they have earned enough experience, level up the ones already on the field. Troops that have earned the requisite experience are surrounded by a red aura and easily discernable. Leveling up troops also costs gold, so you will have to decide whether it's more important to level up, or to place fresh troops. Further adding variety is that each time you level up one your troops, you can do so generally, or focus on their specialty. Each time you upgrade their specialty, they get a smaller damage increase than normal, but increase the power of their special attack. For example, specialty blue mages slow down enemies, which allows nearby troops to attack them for longer; the more specialised a blue mage is, the slower he is able to make the enemy. Good placement and management of specialty troops can make a great difference in the later maps.
Each wave of enemies also has an elemental strength and weakness. As should be obvious, they take less damage from attacks that match their strength, and more damage from attacks that match their weakness. A bar at the bottom of the map lays out the sequence of the waves, and they are coloured in their elemental strength, which you can use as a guide to think ahead. You can click on a particular wave to get a few more details about that enemy, if you also want to plan a few waves ahead to exploit its weakness. Enemies can also have abilities, such as flying, absorbing (which gives them a few hit points when hit by their elemental strength instead of just reducing the damage) and regenerating, as well as having immunities to certain specialties.
The first time you beat a map, you earn a skill point. Skill points can be spent on a basic tech tree that upgrades certain types of troops, unlocks advanced units, and a few other abilities. While I used the advanced units to test them out, they are much more expensive to buy and upgrade than regular units, and didn't feel like value for money. You will need to earn some skills points before you can tackle the harder levels (I failed a number of times on my first medium map before I realised this feature existed!). You can always reassign your skill points between maps, so you don't need to worry about long-term ramifications of choosing your skills.
All of these different gameplay elements add up to allow you to think of various strategies to go about beating a map. Do you pour all your skill points into upgrading one type of troop and spam the map with them? Do you place troops at the back of the map and work forwards, before units at the front soak up all the experience, or build a really strong frontline? Do you put more troops on the map, or upgrade the ones you have? What is the best placement to upgrade specialty troops, and make the most advantage of their skills? How will the decisions I make now affect me in several waves time? These are all questions you will ponder on each map. The maps and the paths the enemies take are varied enough that each offer their own puzzle.
The game is great fun while you are learning the units, how their specials work, and what mix you need to deal with the enemies at hand. In the early game, I felt the learning curve was spot on while learning all these skills. Towards the end of the medium maps, I did find that the challenge was beginning to drop, partly because most maps featured no or only a few waves of a particular element, making it easy to focus on one troop type, and there seemed to be too large room for error. So I looked forward to getting into the hard maps, hoping that the wave patterns would mix it up and have no obvious weakness that could be exploited for the entire map. Unfortunately most of the hard wave sequences were copied verbatim from other maps, meaning most of the same strategies you used before would work here again. You certainly had to be a little more careful how you placed your troops and spent your money in the first several waves, but I often reached a point where I felt there was little chance of me losing the map. As I was playing the final hard map, I hoped there was an ultrahard map to unlock, but alas this is where the game ends.
The game does also score you depending on how well you are doing. The notes on scoring are a little ambiguous, but it does give you a reason to play maps again to go for a higher score. It appears the best bonuses are based on how much money and many lives you have left at the end of each wave, which is incentive to have just enough firepower on the board to take out the current wave, and therein lies the challenge. You won't want to worry about this until after you have completed the game, as the skill point system will factor heavily into improving your score. There is an option to submit your high score and view scores*. It should also be noted that the game saves automatically presumably in cookies*, and allows you to continue the next time you load up the game. This is an essential feature, as you will get at least 10 hours of gameplay.
This is a very enjoyable and accessible game for those who enjoy forward thinking, thinking about all the variables, and want to solve the puzzle presented on each map. It's main shortcomings are the lack of challenge and need to explore new strategies towards the latter parts of the game, but it is still worth seeing all the way through. With some polish, a better difficulty curve, and a few more maps, I think this game has potential as a game for any of the major downloadable services currently available. It costs nothing to try, and is perfect for a bit of strategy during your work lunch break.
* I used Internet Explorer, and did not play on Kongregate's own page for Protector, and the score submission process did not work for me; I imagine it will work on Kongregate's own site.