When I think about possible themes for tower defense games, a tale about space pirates attacking a futuristic Earth in search of highly sought after ‘Spice’ is probably the last thing I’d think of. Yet, that’s exactly the premise of Spice Invaders [Free], a new freemium title from Chillingo. While the game itself is a nice take on tower defense, the bulk of the conversation unfortunately turns to its freemium elements which distract greatly from the actual game.

As a tower defense game, Spice Invaders plays similarly to Fieldrunners [$2.99 / HD]. Players are charged with defending one (or more) bases in open-field maps. Enemies come in waves from a variety of different entrances, forcing you to build towers in such a way as to prevent them from taking out your base. Since the maps are open (with some featuring random barriers littered throughout the map), you can do this by surrounding your base, forcing the baddies into long paths made of towers, and so on.

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I adore tower defense titles, but they tend to be just a bit samey. More than most genres, they rely on a number of standard elements that are rarely done without. Kingdom Rush [$2.99] isn't a mold-breaking game. There are towers, yes, and upgrades and creeps. There is a set path, there are levels. Sometimes the creeps fly. Sometimes there are bosses. You really ought to know all this by now.

Despite the familiarity of its formula, though, Kingdom Rush is absolutely fabulous. With good-natured charm, with clarity of purpose, and with a touch of clever design, this game makes a place for itself in its crowded genre. It's no wonder Ironhide Games Studio's original Flash version is so very popular (a Flash version you can play right here, minus the premium content included in the iOS port).

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Infinite Dreams has jollied up its tower defense title Jelly Defense [$2.99] in celebration of the season. In a new content update that you can grab right now for the price of free, Infinite Dreams has added two all new winter-themed levels, laid down a new music track, dropped in some new leaderboard support, and thrown in a new endless level. Reindeer and cookies are a part of this package as you'll see, and of course, so are optimizations and refinements.

Jelly Defense is a straight-up tower defense title; it's not going to offer you anything you haven't seen before mechanic-wise. But it does have a ton of style. Seeing Infinite do Christmas like it has in Jelly Defense is definitely a treat, so give these levels a look if you haven't updated your app yet. Oh! And if you're on the fence about it, take a gander our our official review.

We've been keeping tabs on Paradox Interactive’s Defenders of Ardania [$4.99 / Free] since its initial unveiling way back in February. While Defenders boasts beautiful artwork and a decent amount of content (including multiplayer), the majority of attention is centered on its gameplay, which attempts to move beyond the typical tower defense experience with some new and interesting ideas. Overall, despite some minor concerns with the UI and other areas, Defenders of Ardania is an excellent addition to the tower defense genre and is a must-try for any fan.

One of the first things you’ll notice when playing are the gorgeous visuals. The artwork showcases a variety of fantastical locales and certainly looks as if the developers paid extra attention to setting the scene for the entirety of the campaign. The actual units and towers look a little out of place, but I think that’s mostly a credit to the attention paid to the backdrops. Of course, heightened visuals aren’t going to necessarily make or break a tower defense game, but well done efforts deserve credit nonetheless.

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We first heard grumblings of long-time console and PC developer Paradox Interactive's newest title Defenders of Ardania back in February of this year, with a new trailer and release date being revealed just last month. Now, Defenders of Ardania [$4.99/Lite] has finally hit the App Store and is available for purchase as we speak (well maybe not speaking, since I'm typing and you're reading, but you get the point).

We briefly got to check out Defenders of Ardania in an extremely early state at GDC this year, and based on the trailer released last month it's made a ton of progress since then. As you can see for yourself, the visuals look quite splendid, but it's the twist on the traditional tower defense formula that excites me the most. You see, you set up your defensive towers in the most strategic way possible in order to fend of the oncoming hordes of enemies, but you're also able to send out waves of your own troops to get down and dirty with the enemy up close and personal in the battlefield. It's the type of subtle twist that might really make Defenders of Ardania stand out from the pack.

We'll be diving into Defenders of Ardania to see if it's as good as the trailer would have us believe, but I've got a pretty good feeling about it. If you're the "live life on the edge" type and don't want to wait around for our review, or if you're already sold on the pedigree of Paradox Interactive and would like to support their very first iOS effort, then feel free to mash away at the link below. Don't forget that there's a lite version to try first and you can also scour the game's forum thread for player impressions.

Tower defense games are a dime a dozen these days and Wild Defense [99¢/$1.99], in spite of its zesty-fresh tropical flavor, doesn't bring anything really new to the table. Still, that doesn't stop it being a moderately entertaining affair. Less a game for the casual enthusiast and more for the hardcore fan, this one is for those who just have to have another tower defense game on their phones.

Functionality-wise, Wild Defense will be rather cut and dry for tower defense aficionados. Your objective is a simple one: protect your fortress from the enemy waves. To accomplish this, you'll have to drag and drop your units onto strategic locations in the map, all the while trying to maintain a proper composition of troops to ensure that you can deal with the various enemy types. In addition, you'll also have to do things like purchase weapons for your army, work with bombs, cast spells, defeat bosses and occasionally play the Wild Defense equivalent of Russian Roulette.

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Way back in February we brought you the news that Paradox Interactive, a highly regarded developer of PC and console titles, was getting ready to dip its toes into the world of iOS gaming with their upcoming tower defense game Defenders of Ardania. While the tower defense genre is a well-treaded path on the App Store already, that hasn't stopped titles that used innovative ideas from standing out from the pack. For example, this year's Anomaly Warzone Earth [$1.99/UHD] flipped tower defense on its ear by having you play the attackers trying to take out the defense towers, rather than the other way around.

Defenders of Ardania will utilize this "tower offense" style somewhat too, while actually still remaining a traditional-style tower defense game at its core. You'll place various types of towers around each map strategically in an effort to stop the oncoming stream of attackers, however you will also be able to send out your own stream of offensive troops to battle against the enemy head on in the field. In addition to these two attack types, there will be some pretty intense looking magic spells to cast upon your enemy as well.

The tricky part of all this is that your towers, magic spells, and offensive troops will all be powered from the same pool of mana. So, you'll need to figure out how best to utilize each one while not completely depleting your mana resources. It all sounds quite interesting, and a nice departure from most other tower defense games. Defenders of Ardania is slated for a December 6th release on multiple platforms including the iPad. We'll certainly be giving it a look when it hits the App Store early next month.

As wonderful of a thing as the App Store is, it comes with a heck of a seedy underbelly of unscrupulous developers and I really hate how often it seems like we're posting these rip-off alerts lately. Shameless clones are one thing, but flat out stealing a game's assets is an entirely different animal. Today's victims are the guys from Ironhide Game Studio, who currently have three different Flash games out in the wild. Kingdom Rush is their most popular, which is currently ripping up the charts on the various Flash game portal sites, and is boasting 40 million total plays worldwide. You can add one more to that number by clicking here and checking it out, it's a pretty cool little tower defense game.

In late July, Ironhide Games released Kingdom Rush, and in the last few weeks of October, My Yayi released the same game on the App Store… Although, you'll notice that the Ironhide and Armor Games logos have been removed, making the whole thing that much more damning. In fact, if you want to see a ton of other ripped assets, click the above image for a full-size comparison of multiple levels.

The guys from Ironhide Games have already explored all the regular channels to get the game taken down, including sending copyright infringement notices, contacting Apple, and even hiring outside consultants to help get it removed. Yet, it remains. We've heard the actual process of getting a stolen game removed can be rather slow from other developers who have experienced similar problems, but it's no-doubt incredibly painful for the original creators to look at the game up on the App Store in the meantime.

Saving Moo [$0.99 / HD], one of several recent offerings from ClickGamer, is the latest addition to the elusive genre of Cow Defense. If rescuing our four-legged brethren suits your fancy (or if you’re a fan of certain classic tower defense games), then Saving Moo’s weird story and presentation, combined with solid tower defense gameplay elements, should work for you.

Saving Moo puts you in the role of a farmer that acquired psychic powers after an alien abduction. In order to prevent future abductions, you must use the farmer’s newfound powers to telekinetically place weapons on your cows to ward off the impending UFO invasion. Even though the story is mainly told through a short introductory cutscene, I still found it hilarious and absolutely befitting for the sort of offbeat attitude that Saving Moo offers.

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Dungeon Defenders: Second Wave (see what Trendy did there) will be released as a free update to the iOS versions of Dungeon Defenders: First Wave [$2.99] tomorrow, the developer has told us via an e-mail release. According to Trendy, Second Wave addresses "many of the issues" from the first game, including the horrendously cluttered UI and clunky menus that kept us from enjoying its first try at an iOS port of its downloadable game.

In addition to these improvements, Second Wave will see "performance improvements," and a player-versus-player content package called "Arena." If you pop out your eyeglasses, you'll be able to see some of these tweaks and adds in its newly-released trailer.

In case you didn't know, Dungeon Defenders is now available on Xbox Live Arcade and as a PC release on Steam. These versions are particularly good according to media types, so you might want to consider checking those out if you're into the game's hack-and-slash meets tower defense action.

With the proliferation of camera-equipped smartphones that also double as mobile gaming systems in the last few years, the amount of augmented reality apps and games has surged. While there are a ton of ingenious non-gaming ways to use AR on your smartphone, the vast majority of the games that used the technology boiled down to slapping some graphical assets onto your device's camera view and calling it a game, with little regard for how the augmented reality portion actually affected or enhanced the gameplay.

One title that bucked that trend and changed how I feel about most AR games was last year's ARDefender [99¢] from French developer Int 13. ARDefender had you printing out a special diagram from the ARDefender website (or as we've come to find, just displaying the diagram on a separate device or computer screen) which would then be read by the game using the camera on your iPhone or iPod touch. The game would create a tower on top of this diagram, making it appear that it was actually there in the space where your camera was pointed. Then enemies would come after this tower in waves, and you'd use an assortment of weaponry affixed to the top of your tower to fend them off.

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I discovered tower defense late in my gaming career. I have no good justification for this. Perhaps I was too busy burying my face into all the RPGs and sidescrollers I could find. However, my intro game into the genre was PixelJunk Monsters, and if you gotta discover late, it may as well be with one of the genre's best entries. Ever since, I salivate Pavlovian-style every time someone murmurs the words "tower defense," and I had the same reaction when Gem Keeper [$2.99] was mentioned around the Touch Arcade office. I also was digging the fact that NCSoft made it, because I like them and I wanted to see how their skills would translate to iOS.

Like any proper tower defense title, Gem Keeper has plenty of levels to keep your building skills busy. 30 are available in total, and over the course of gameplay you have the ability to earn 14 different towers to use to strategically keep baddies out of your fortress. You'll start slow, with only a basic gunfire tower and a few bombs at your disposal. However, soon enough you'll be slowing em down with sticky goo and firing giant spiked cannonballs. I loved that you had the option to switch between Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty at anytime, even right before you start a level. Gem Keeper doesn't disappoint when it comes to the challenge either, but I'll return to that later.

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Jelly Defense [$2.99], a tower defense game that absolutely crushes it on the art and production front, is apparently riding a wave of success. Creator Infinite Dreams shot us over a press release this morning noting how it's taken a couple of number one App Store chart spots across the globe, but it also tipped us off on a 'huge' update that hit the other day. The headliner is the game's new "easy" or baby mode, which gives lays off on the casual among us. Courtesy of a few mystery tweaks, Jelly Defense is now also better performing and more balanced.

I'll summon my inner Billy Mays here and mention that's not all -- users can now turn off the sound and music in the game, speed-up the waves instead of just inviting more, and enjoy the wonders of 'improved coin collecting.' Cool!

As I mentioned to Eli earlier today, just looking at Jelly Defense makes me happy. It looks sharp, it nails cute, and it's also a pretty competent tower defense game. I reviewed it this month, by the way, if you're in the market for something like this.

Yesterday, TouchArcade attended EA's Naughty or Nice game event in New York and spent time with a number of just-announced titles on the way from Chillingo. Perhaps the most stand-0ut game of the lot is Zombie Wonderland 2, sequel to the June 2010 release Zombie Wonderland [App Store]. As in the original, the upcoming sequel puts you in the shoes of Chuck, the renowned Zombie Cleaner of the pleasant little '50s Americana town, Niceville. While, before, your task was to keep the homes of your clients as clean and as zombie-free as possible, your new order of business is a bit more complex a proposition.

Now, while we aren't allowed to get into to many details as far as the storyline goes, just yet, I can tell you that the rooms you will be defending (and cleaning) are, this time around, spread throughout time. From the local museum, which serves as a kind of time-hub, you will be traveling to medieval castles, ancient Egyptian crypts, Viking halls, and ancient Japanese dwellings -- all riddled with zombies that make terrible stains when dispatched.

Some of the tasks that must be completed involve several stages set in different locations and / or times. For instance, one of your clients, Vlad the vampire, has given up drinking blood and moved over to milk. So you must travel through time to get him a glass of milk by milking a cow in a zombie-swarmed barn. Each of the temporally far-flung locales features its own mini-boss that appears and drives the zombies into attack frenzies that make the task of keeping the rooms clean and zombie-free quite a challenge.

While the original release featured four locations, four weapons, and five types of zombies, Zombie Wonderland 2 delivers 25 locations, 25 weapons, and 22 types of zombies, as well as a mega-boss zombie. Some of the weapons available are special bullets, medusa bullets, gnawers, turrets, lightning bottles, killer grass, the brain toy -- even a Roomba(-like robotic vacuum). Weapons can be damaged by zombies, but can also be repaired. New weapons can be quickly bought via in-app purchases or unlocked through dedicated gameplay.

Some areas of the town's museum are visibly under construction, and serve as placeholders for additional areas that will arrive in updates, down the road.

We'll take a closer look at Zombie Wonderland 2 when it arrives sometime before Christmas, but, however we rate it, it's sure to is sure to take the crown as far as number of genres represented. This survival cleaning, time management, tower defense zombie shooter will be priced at $0.99.

Anomaly Warzone Earth [$1.99] just became an even crazier-good proposition for iPad 2 owners: 11 Bit Studios has just released an update for both versions of the already fantastic-looking game, adding in an extra layer or two of graphical awesome specifically for the platform. New blur and glow effects, as well as enhanced shadowing, contrast, saturation, and much more dynamic environmental touches have been added in addition to bug fixes and Universal support.

Outside of the new iPad 2 eye candy -- and to be clear, the game still looks great post-update -- 11 Bit has added that new Squad Assault Rearmed map and also fixed that pesky Commander Trials issue that has plagued the game since release. Oh! And Facebook posting is now better.

As if that wasn't enough Anomaly news for your eyeholes, we've got some sale details to spill: the game is currently available at $1.99 for a limited time. We can’t be friends anymore if you don’t buy it at this price (since it’s so good and all).