Garfield's Defense: Attack of the Food Invaders is a free-to-play Mobile Phone Game developed by Web Prancer under license of Paws Incorporated and released to iOS and Android on Sep. 17th, 2012. It follows Garfield and his friends as they defend their home (more specifically, their fridge) from an Alien Invasion.
A sequel, Garfield’s Defense 2: The Food Invaders Strike Back was released at a later date, but has since been removed for unknown reasons. Its release date may be lost to time.
Garfield's Defense: Attack Of The Food Invaders contains examples of the following tropes:
- Alien Invasion: The entire plot of the game.
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: To prevent obvious cheese strategies, there can only be one Arlene, Orson and Dino Odie respectively on the battlefield at a time.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Skills that deal damage directly with the exception of Jon. Investing in early-game Skills is wasteful since they’ll constantly be replaced by better ones, and in the mid-game cookies would be much better-spent on other things, reaching levels of damage that Skills can never hope to achieve with the same amount of cookies. Even a maxed-out Skill would only deal marginally more damage than Garfield’s regular attacks. By the late-game, direct-damage Skills are completely pushed out of relevancy.
- Ditto Aliens: With the exception of their leader, the meatball aliens are all identical.
- Forced Level-Grinding: This might have been by design as a way to get the player to buy cookies, but you will have to grind cookies to beat the game, even if you’re playing on a file where both Challenge Modes are unlocked.
- Fragile Speedster: Roy. He’s extremely fast, but will go down in just a few hits and needs to hide behind a tank like Orson. This also applies to the soda straw enemies.
- Frying Pan of Doom: Garfield’s third weapon is a frying pan.
- Glass Cannon: You may not guess it at lower levels, but at max level Roy has the highest damage output in the game by far, at over a thousand. It’s a shame he has an extremely low amount of health.
- Invincibility Power-Up: Garfield’s Suit Up Box, which grants Garfield invincibility for 15 seconds. Given the nature of the game, the best use for this is to have Garfield stand in front of the enemy horde and stall them for 15 seconds, buying more time.
- Magikarp Power: At lower levels, Roy looks like an extremely overpriced Friend with comically low health and damage, but by max level he has the highest damage output in the game, and is summoned by the max level Trumpet. Speaking of the Trumpet, its summons are extremely lackluster and its healing is very weak and doesn’t increase with levels, making the Trumpet seem near-useless… until you upgrade it to level 9, and it gains a chance to summon Roys. This combo is invaluable in the late game.
- Mighty Glacier: Orson has by far the most health out of all of the Friends, and hits the hardest. His tankiness makes him an absolute must-have in the second half of the game.
- Random Effect Spell: The Trumpet. It has a 50/50 chance to either heal Garfield and all Friends a small amount, or perform one out of three Friend summons.
- Red Boxing Gloves: The Boxing Glove skill, which has Garfield kick a box containing a spring-loaded red boxing glove at the enemy.
- Rolling Pin of Doom: Garfield’s second weapon is a rolling pin.
