I do not want to rate this negatively however in its current state it is in desperate need of balance patching.
The foundation is strong and it could be a very good with a combination of rogue-like elements, simple city building, exploration and tower defense but the current version of the game is a ode to unfulfilled possibility.
[h1]General premise[/h1]
You have a small town with gold mine, as you place duplicate copies of buildings they get progressively more expensive as a sort of "tax" that prevents you from spamming too many of the same buildings, you can build and upgrade during the days and then at night you fight off waves of enemies as they come towards you town, you play 3 campaign maps that get progressively harder before unlocking the endless mode. You also have upgrades you can earn with XP to help you on subsequent runs, you town starts off small and you explore around you to unlock hidden random bonuses that coupled with the random bonuses you get at the end of the rounds and the factions "choices" you get represent the rogue-like aspect.
[h2]City Building[/h2]
[b]5/10 Its pretty bad[/b]
You have to purchase plots of land to expand your town and those suffer from the same tax growth as buildings, by the time you expand your city to 4 or 5 slots, unless you have gotten really lucky with RNG finds from exploring then your town slots are so expensive that you will be unable to keep pace with the game scaling and die a slow death.
This type of city building could work if there were more adjacency bonuses between buildings that would lead you to make interesting decisions, or if some of the objects you find while exploring could be encompassed into your city, which could expand on the anemic rogue-like aspects.
[h2]rogue-like[/h2]
[b]1/10 lol?[/b]
When we talk about rogue-like, we are talking about some RNG elements that contribute to interesting and dynamic replayability, not a zero sum game where you keep restarting until you get what you need just to play through a normal game.
Rogue-like takes two aspects in this game, the stuff you find from exploring, of which you 100% need either a gold boost early in the game to get ahead of the difficulty scaling or a boost to income for the same reason. The other part comes from you faction rewards at the end of each day which you are looking for either income boosts or free towers and damage boosts to specific towers.
If you dont get these specific bonuses, restart you are not going to make it past level 20 in the endless mode.
[h2]factions[/h2]
[b]1/10 lol again?[/b]
With the number of tower defense games out there on mobile and PC I honestly do not understand how you screwed this up.
There are "4" factions in the game
[list]
[*]First one gets no bonuses, okay sure hard mode or whatever.
[*]The second gets 1 extra fog cleared up per scouting, this faction is kinda usable but gets overshadowed by the 4th faction.
[*]The third faction gets a free extra town square at the start, just one so no capacity to scale at all
[*]Faction four gets 1 free extra bonus at the end of every round, this is the only truly playable faction but also introduces the issue with exploration.
[/list]
The factions could be so much more interesting then they are now, faction 3 could instead get discounts on expanding and building making them the builder faction, faction 2 could get unique hidden bonuses and get rewarded for building out to said bonuses making funky looking towns, there should totally be a combat faction that gets bonuses to the towers of some capacity. Again just wasted potential...
[h2]Exploration[/h2]
[b]3/10 serviceable[/b]
As with most of this game, there is so much being left on the table with the exploration, the biggest problem is that you have to choose between exploring and other items like faction four's unique rewards at the end of every round, most of the time the bonuses you get from the finds in the fog are not very good at all but even assuming you get only the best of these, beyond a couple of tiles out from the city there is no point in continuing to explore and that brings us to the last point.
[h2]Tower Defense[/h2]
[b]4/10 meh[/b]
Where to start with this, I have been playing tower defense games since they were map mods on the original StarCraft and AOEII. At their core a good TD is the power fantasy of the RTS genre, this game could not be further from that vision.
To start with the monsters only ever come from a straight and very short path leading right to your town, this could have been a way to reward exploration by allowing the path to be moved and expanded upon but again, wasted potential.
Alright so we don't have any sort of mazing to work with, plenty of TD's do this so what is the next go to? Slow and Stun towers, you get 1 tower that stuns and another that has a small knock back, both of which are terrible and worst in class, as a matter of fact you only have 3 towers to work with and one of those is only manually fired with a long cool down.
[h2]Conclusion[/h2]
You may find it funny that I am ripping so hard on 7 dollar TD game, but what really bothers me the most is that this could totally be one of the best casual/chill and repayable TD's on the market with a ton of content and the Dev's were SO CLOSE I can almost taste it.
In the current iteration, if you do not get either a large gold boost, free towers or a ton of bonus income you might as well just restart the map, you are going to die a slow and drawn regardless of what you do. You wont really get why you are losing until you have played it many times over and by the time you figure it out its going to be too late to ask for a refund.
I have see people saying this somehow means the game has depth but obfuscation != depth. Nor does needing only specific combinations of RNG equal rogue-like experience.
Dev's I hope you make a sequel to this game or release some expansions/dlc, your work really deserves more than this.
