Mods are, more often than not, incredibly awesome things. The good ones tend to build a sense of community and promote longevity amongst users, while the bad ones are usually really fun to insult.

Personally, I have a great love of mods. It's game design made easy, which makes the creative neurons in my brain dedicated to fantasy very happy. Often, I find myself heavily involved in a game's modding community, as a user and a creator. Because of this, I've decided to dedicated a series of articles to mods, showcasing the many interesting custom games I've encountered in my digital travels.

My first mod is not a very elusive mod. If you've spent any amount of time playing Warcraft 3 on battlenet chances are, along with DotA, you've played it to death already. This article was not written for you; this article was written for those poor empty souls who have yet to experience it's majesty. “What majesty is that?” you may ask, with your soon-to-be fulfilled lives, Elemental Tower Defense is that majesty, dear reader, rivaling spangled banners, twilight's gleaming, bursting bombs and corn dogs. It's even made a name for itself outside of battlenet as a flash game, and the reason for this is simple. It kicks ass. A lot of ass.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with tower defenses, let me take a moment to explain. They are a class of strategy games born from Warcraft 3. The standard objective of a Tower Defense, or TD, is to destroy several waves of creeps traveling through your maze of towers, before they reach the end. Every creep kill yields money, which you must use to upgrade your towers to thwart newer, tougher creeps. Some TDs throw in unique objectives, but almost all adhere to these basic elements.

EleTD is one of the most professional Tower Defenses available. It's very clean and very polished. There are a few imbalances, but they aren't too terrible. But now, let's get down to gameplay. What makes EleTD so unique is the presence of “elementals” that influence your tower upgrades. Choosing the dark elemental allows you to create dark towers, the light elemental allows light towers, and so on.

Once you've gotten threw a few minutes of gameplay and you've chosen a few elementals, you can combine them in groups of two or three to create special towers with unique abilities. There are 41 abilities total and 123 possible towers, adding leagues of strategic depth.

Like most Warcraft 3 mods, EleTD has a multilayer component, allowing you to compete with anyone on battlenet. There are a few game modes to elevate your level of challenge, like race mode or insane mode, adding more length to the already long thread of replayability.

Anyone who owns Warcraft 3 and has not played EleTd, should pick this mod up immediately. It's entirely free and incredibly fun. For those of you too lazy to look, I'll provide a website link and a download link, should the website should ever go belly up and some future reader gets blue balls franticly searching the net for a copy.

Offical Website: http://www.eletd.com/

Akolyte's Unofficial Download: http://www.savefile.com/files/1695716