Ambitious design, marred by poor balancing.
Okay, so Matthew did the thing with the map screen and the long-term character advancement. And he created a lot of different unit types to attack you. And he even created a whole bunch of different tactical upgrades you can use in the middle of a stage. So what went wrong? Why isn't this game as popular as, say, GameInABottle's Balloon Invasion, which boasted many of the same gameplay elements?
In a word: execution.
These different gameplay systems worked well together in Balloon Invasion (and later, GemCraft,) because they played off of each other to make the game more fun and more interesting. In Final Defense: Last Stand, most of the gameplay systems are completely useless (unless the level objective requires you to use them.)
GAMEPLAY:
The towers shoot wherever you point and click. Unfortunately, it takes a long time for the shots to reach the enemy. I suspect he is using a Movieclip for each shot (expensive!) and simple HitTests for collision (klunky, and limits the speed of shots!) For better performance, I recommend using good old-fashioned geometry math to do collisions, and BitmapData and CopyPixels or Draw to render graphics to the screen.
Most games, there's a certain amount of flexibility in how the player goes about his job. You can take a certain number of hits, and skilled playing means you can avoid damage. In this game, you ALWAYS take the hits. Always. You're a stationary target, and even if you fire the INSTANT the enemy comes on-screen, they will always get a shot off at you because your bullets are so slow.
This means the player has very little room for error, and no chance to play creatively. There is only one way to win. Superior numbers. There is only one way to get these numbers. Grinding. To buy the first Auto-Repair powerup, you must beat the first stage over and over again.
MAP SCREEN:
In Balloon Invasion, you could pick any level you wanted, but you had to unlock them in order first. In FD:LS, all the levels are available for you right at the start, but trying to play most of them is suicide. Imagine if you started playing a Mega Man game, you picked a stage, and then you immediately died, every time, because you didn't already have the platform item from another stage. To misquote Yahtzee misquoting Winston Churchill: Those who implement open-world gameplay while maintaining a linear difficulty curve deserve neither.
CHARACTER PROGRESSION:
It's neat to be able to buy stuff off a menu. And it's awesome to gradually build up your character's abilities during the course of a game so that you can take on the harder stages. Unfortunately, the only shop items that are persistent from one stage to another are Economy and Auto-Repair. These are both basically buffers-- multipliers that increase a number. They don't drastically alter gameplay or give you the option of combining them in different ways to sneakily achieve gameplay goals. They just make a number go up; arguably the least interesting gameplay change possible.
BUGS:
- Currently, Economy costs 18,000, and no matter how many times I click on it, it doesn't increase the cost or disappear the way Auto-repair did.
- If the level ends while trucks are unloading their troops, all the troops will disembark and stand frozen until you close the buy menu. Could have been worse. At least you don't have enemies firing a million shots if this happens while they're shooting, or something else game-breaking like that.
These kinds of bugs pop up a lot when you insist on using Movieclips for everything. Do yourself a favor, and learn how to use math to keep track of collisions and bitmap programming to draw graphics to the screen. If using AS3, I recommend boning up on the BitmapData class. Your games will become a little more complex to program, but a LOT more stable.
OVERALL:
This is an ambitious attempt, but it falls flat in terms of gameplay. Don't feel too bad. I've been there. Learn from your mistakes and move on! Good luck with your next game. Keep trying. This had potential.