The Smurfs - Flower Defense Hands-On: An Adorable Strategy Game On Quest

The Smurfs – Flower Defense is a casual cartoon strategy game that's surprisingly hard to put down.

I’m embarrassed to admit how much of my teen years I spent playing tower defense games. From Plants Vs Zombies to Bloons, it’s a genre that’s easy to sink time into, especially as they ramp up in difficulty and introduce chaotic new tools into the mix. Developed by Microids and Kalank Games, The Smurfs – Flower Defense is a mixed reality take on the genre featuring all the classic hallmarks of the Tower Defense format you know and love, with some immersive additions that will test your strategic capabilities and reaction time.

Flower Defense kicks off in Smurf Village, with the world being turned upside down as the Smurfs' age-old villain, Gargamel, interrupts a magical ceremony and summons a series of dimension-shifting portals. With twenty innocent Smurfs now missing, and you, a human, transported into the Smurf world, your job is to find and free the lost villagers and make it home. The story itself isn’t particularly engaging but Flower Defense fills in this world with vibrant cartoon animations and playful voice acting.

Each level in Flower Defense begins with a short blurb of the challenge ahead, listing the enemy variants you’ll face as well as the prize you’ll unlock if successful. Your time is split between preparing for, and reacting to, waves of enemies as you try to rescue the Smurfs, who are trapped in glass bottles after Gargamel’s portal shenanigans. As a human, your size awards you with a top-down perspective and you can prepare for the fight by placing down preliminary buildings, like crossbow towers and fences, before summoning enemy forces by pulling a wooden lever attached to the map. The main currency used to build structures is wood, and while you’ll start levels with a small pouch, killing enemies will reward you with more resources to build defenses with during a given level. 

A cute thematic inclusion in Flower Defense is that your structures will also need to be manned by Smurfs to function, and you get to throw your pint-sized warriors between the structures to stop enemies as they plod on. In early levels, the maps are relatively simple, and you’ll only have two or three Smurfs to wield. However, as you earn a few more and unlock some extra structures and complicated maps, you can begin to experiment meaningfully with your strategies.

This brings me to my favourite aspect of Flower Defense. As you progress, you’ll begin to unlock more ‘main character’ Smurfs, who diversify how you can interact in levels. Initially, Brainy Smurf is with you and helps you with contraptions, but it’s not long before Smurfette shows up and brings a seed-shooting pistol along with her. Now, instead of building and waiting for more resources to arrive, you can help your Smurfs by switching to a weapon and shooting at enemies yourself. While the basic gameplay was serviceable on its own, the addition of this shooting gallery mini-game engaged my inner arcade fiend and allowed me to engage even more as waves of bad guys began to swarm.

The addition of Smurfette’s seed pistol also brings new enemies, and alongside managing ground invasions, you’ll now have to take out an aerial assault, too. Taking damage from flying insects neuters your abilities, meaning you won't be able to use any tools for a few seconds. My once adorable cartoon strategy game started morphing into a ‘My First Bullet Hell’ experience, and I began waving my hand around erratically, trying to avoid the activity-freezing projectiles. 

It’s not all cutesy chaos, though, and between levels, you’ll return to the floating hub island haven of Smurf Village. While at first it’s pretty dead, it starts to liven up as you complete levels and bring the blue villagers back home. It’s a clever touch that not only provided a friendly visual indicator of my progress but also provided me with the motivation to keep saving my adopted blue buddies.

All in, I was pleasantly surprised at just how Smurf-centric Flower Defense is. Instead of slapping a Smurfs skin on top of a VR strategy prototype, the game is built meaningfully around the property, with many thoughtful flourishes for fans, such as the inclusion of Gargamel's dastardly co-conspirators, Azrael and Howlibird.

The Smurfs: Flower Defense is a polished and surprisingly moreish tower defense game that feels great to play in VR. Between blasting bugs out of the sky and quickly mending fences mid-fight, I found it easy to sink hours into, with only the low battery buzz on my headset alerting me to how long I’d been playing. With three chapters still to work through, I’m keen to keep kicking butt and saving my Smurfy friends. 

The Smurfs – Flower Defense is available on Quest now.