Thank you Ratalaika Games for sending us the game to review!

Defend Your Crypt is a strategy game that has the player take control of a long-deceased Pharaoh. He has the special ability to activate traps inside different tombs in an attempt to stop thieves from stealing its gold.

The tutorial stages teach the player how and when to activate traps. Traps come in many different shapes such as trap floors, flamethrowers, crossbows, stone presses, and many more gruesome hazards. Each trap must be unlocked using skulls. You start the level with a set amount of skulls to use, and with each thief that bites the dust, one more skull is added to your total. Once a trap has been activated, it must cooldown for a short period before it can be used again. Each fiendish device is extremely fun to master, as getting multiple kills with one device can make that wave of enemies a little more manageable. If three thieves happen to make their way to the gold it's game over.

Each stage has a 3-skull rating system. Completing a stage without a thief reaching the gold will result in a 3-skull rating. Should a thief get to the gold, a skull will be removed. These skulls are needed to unlock much harder versions of the original 30 stages. These harder stages usually have more thieves with almost no room for errors. Anyone that thinks the normal stages are too easy will find these stages to be much more challenging to 100%. If that wasn't enough, there are achievements to unlock for doing specific tasks.

Naturally, the game has an Egyptian theme to its 8-bit style. The tomb may look cramped on the 3DS' bottom screen, but I never had an issue making out what was going on. The bottom screen is where the action will take place, but later levels can be two screens tall. These levels task the player with switching between levels of the tomb, as the traps can only be activated from the touch screen. These stages become frenetic, but with patience can easily be overcome.

The music in the game is always great to hear when starting a level. There are about five different tracks that can be played when starting a level, and they all blend well with the game's environment. The traps all have distinct sound effects when activated which are clear and crisp. Even the thieves themselves all make distinct sounds upon death depending on which trap they walked into.

The biggest, and really only moral warnings about this game are the blood and violence. Whether it's a body being squished or a scorpion attacking a thief, blood is always left behind. This is serves as a reminder to the other thieves that they could easily be the next one to die there. To those that don't want to see any blood, the devs actually included an option to turn it off.

Defend Your Crypt is an extremely fun budget title that is really only marred by some grammatical errors. There's plenty of challenge waiting in this title and I highly recommend it to fans of strategy and tower defense games. For $3 it's not going to break the bank and it's filled with hours of fun.

-Kyuremu