Drone is created by David W Wilson, it's a blend of shooter and tower defence which has been conceptually executed very well...

You control a ship which you can purchase melee and ranged weapons for. Bashing or shooting enemies gives you money which you can either spend on more ammo or machines. Machines are the tower defence aspect of Drone, you can deploy simple turrets, large cannons, resource gathering scouts and a full range of both defensive and offensive structures. The task is to survive wave after wave of foe, each wave throwing in different combinations of fast melee fighters or slow ranged fighters. The canvass is open at the beginning which may make you not really think about where to place the deployable defences but after a while of grinding away at the introductory waves you will have to think on your feet and improvise good defence patterns. My method was to lay down my weaker defences around the side and in a cog-style circle build stronger units towards the middle. 

It's easy to get caught up in the tower defending but you quickly realise that simply placing defences alone is not going to last long as most structures have a relatively low health, meaning that you often have to play 'medic,' scooting over to the areas of your defence grid which need most attention. Similarly, money is spent quickly and loading all of your cash into ship armaments instead of structures will see you being swarmed by ships much faster and stronger than your own.

The presentation as a whole is excellent, the music is quite background and the sound design could use some less annoying sounds but the audio only mildly diminishes an otherwise fantastically clean and solid aesthetic. My only real concerns come in the pacing of the game, where the tutorial is excellently designed, the starting stages are far too long and quickly become a chore after you have gotten to grips with the mechanics. The game excells at making you think on your feet, often the game introduces new and unexpected foe which force you to rethink your defensive positions.

I find tower defence games quite boring as a whole but games like this which successfully reconstruct the bloated genre into something which feels new are to be congratulated. From scouring David's blog it's clear he is a developer who is very design and art led, part of the newly emerging, artistically minded indie developers who are using modern tools to achieve professional products either alone or in a small team. Drone Part 2 is due out within 12 months, part 1 is strong enough to keep me coming back to it over the months keeping this guy on my radar.

Download the game over at GameJolt: http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/shooter/drone-part-1/1686/

Download the game over at GameJolt: http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/shooter/drone-part-1/1686/