Color Defense

From my early perspective it's not a bad idle Tower Defense game. If you've played tower defenses, the concept of building a mixture of different element towers and traps for a mixture of different element monsters and monsters with magic/armor resistence is not a new concept. There's a build button and an upgrade button and the waves run themselves automatically. That's like 90% of the first few hours of play which gives you time to poke around the other features. You can figure it out with a small amount of intuition. What's interesting is when you lose, all your build stays and the waves restart at lvl 1 and go again. This lets you continue to upgrade and streamline your towers and traps to push higher max waves. There is no real punishment other than waves restarting at 1 and going again. The points of discouragement I've experienced so far have been that once you have a trap on every tile, a tower on every path-adjacent tile, there's not a whole lot to do but wait. But I mean it's a simple idle game so I guess that's to be expected. the upgrade cost for what you get doesn't feel good but you can buy upgrades in multiples which sort of fixes the problem. I might suggest simply 10x the cost and the upgrade value to make it feel more substantial. These things and the offline progress, at least for gold, is pretty low so you kind of need the game running. That's kind of it in a nutshell though. There's clearly a lot I haven't unlocked yet based on how many additional maps there are so this review is really just a fresh start reflection.

Could have easily been my favorite game ever, combining the genres of idle & tower defense beautifully, if it were just more fully developed. It's quite bare bones, doesn't have any explanations in game, and you're only able to play on 1 map at a time. With a year more of development from a team of one, could've easily been a 5$ game that would provide entertainment for thousands of hours. Even in its current state, it's very hard to put down and has an upgrade system that keeps you progressing at all times. Phat missed opportunity abandoning the project so early.

☀️

So I recently played a tower defense game called Defense Grid: The Awakening, which I got for free over at Epic Games. It was pretty good. Nice looking towers with interesting abilities, great visuals, decent music and a voice over for each level. It got me interested in looking for other tower defense games. This game has few of those features. Four types of tower (counting floor traps) in four different colors for some reason. Very upgradeable which is cool I must say. No voice work and the music, eh, YMMV. The hardest part of this game is it makes no sense. There is no code-book to explain what is happening beyond "this is a tower defense game, roll with it". What do the different colors mean, if anything? In what way is blue different than green? I see it is called Color Defense so I imagine the colors have something to do with the story if there is one. Oh Hey, at the bottom of the screen I see 12 buttons, what are they? Hmm, the first two are Building and Upgrading. OK, that makes sense! Out of the other ten, only two can I figure out. There is something call crafting that doesn't seem to do anything at all. But it has something to do with Gems. Oh Gems! For some reason this game encourages me to collect gems. Lots of them. In all four colors. Red, Purple, Green and Blue. (those are the four colors of everything in this game). Are they worth anything? Not that I can tell, although if I spend 1000 gold, I can plant a gem on a lily pad and it will grow more gems all by itself to dump into my inventory. Uhhhh, ok. I now have about 15000 of each color gem and they don't seem to do anything for me. This game is just plain WIERD. There is some larger story or plan that the developers had in mind but never got around to explaining. However, WHY DID I GIVE THIS AN UPVOTE? As a tower defense game, It is actually medium entertaining, especially when you factor in the Idle portion of the game. Go to sleep with your game running and wake up to discover you have earned several million gold to upgrade everything with. Yay, easy money! THAT I can understand. As a Tower Defense game it plays well, even if you know you are missing out on 50% of the content because the developers didn't explain it. One can hope that if I keep playing it, there will be an Ah-Ha moment when some piece of this makes sense. That is a lousy way to entice people to play it, again I blame the lazy development. There are some features I like. The buff system. Active clickable buffs, random buffs and timed buffs. It is an interesting mechanism and it is kinda fun. Bottom line, if you really like tower defense games, this one is mildly fun. And a bit addictive, rather like that old Cookie Clicker game, remember THAT one? Push that in as a tower defense game and you get Color Defense.

The mix of idle game and tower defense is surprisingly clever! The UI took a little getting used to. Neat concept, and lots of very long term progression. If you re-play tower defense levels to see how far you can push them, this re-imagines it as an endless that can go on for months if you wanted it to, with a sort of basic skill tree system.

As an idle game, this game is excessively slow to do anything and requires quite a bit of manual upkeep. Despite my hours on this game, it wasn't that enjoyable, I'm just severely addicted to idle games. The main currency, Evo points, can takes weeks to get one reset for in reasonable quantities, and those 'reasonable quantities' will only get you a few minor upgrades, improving your ability to deal damage or gain gold or something else by only decimal points. On top of that, the game is artificially made even slower by long periods of mandatory inaction between waves of enemies, starting at 10 seconds of nothing between waves, which can be slowly lowered over time, but still feels quite unfun.