Fortifend

Uhhhhh.... this is actually incredible. And im totally confused by that. It just came out, flew totally under the radar and has, as of writing, zero reviews. I just came to this game by a random steam friend buying it and clicking on it out of curiosity. So after just about half an hour trying it, i felt i create a premature review, to possibly boost the game and the dev. First off, the game runs totally fine on my quite aged PC. I run a 2080, Ryzen 2700 and 16 GB RAM and i maintain 60fps consistently. Now to the gameplay. The game looks totally unique and kind of reminds me about Megabonk but Towerdefense. It has quirky 3D art mixed with 2D sprites and some well animated environments. It works, it looks great, it feels great. Building is also totally unique in my book. It takes the approach of games like "Foundation" where people build their houses by themselves. You just create production facilities and harvesting buildings. The building cast is a bit small. You build farms, woodcutter and mines for harvest. You build a toolcrafter, library (makes books out of wood), armory (creates...well armory, which is basically a resource you pay for upgrades in towers), a market and thats about it. And although thats limited, it works mostly well. I personally wished there was some more depth to production, maybe a winery to turn food into luxury food. Kind of boosting your labor income through luxury crafting. But admittedly i just started playing the first mission, so i have absolutely no idea what might be unlocked later and maybe i have missed stuff i will later learn, so, take any negative with a grain of salt. What is a in terms of economy however, worked fine and was fun. Now building itself is also quite cool and organic. Walls attach to towers and look nice. Theres quirky people running around. Their pathing has an impact on their speed and they create paths. Each year theres some weird monsters spawning (you know from where they come in advance) and you need to prepare. Once they spawn, you cant build anything and need to defend. Thats where i still dont really understand the design here and need to find out more. Theres a fast forward/speed up button, but the game seems to run in "rounds". Basically when you want to go to the next season (round), you press the button. So my rounds played out by building whatever i could with my available labor (thats your people resource), which you need for everything. Once it runs out, i skip to the next round to gain more labor. I can do that 3 times, the fourth is the attack season. Im not sure what speeding up does while you are in a normal building season. People move around, but resources are only gained each season (so basically you have +600 food, you get that food once you skip to next season). Im also not sure how labor is working well here. It became a hard bottleneck for my actions and i had plenty of food (like 10k stacked with +700 income) and i didnt feel much of an impact. Another confusion was when selecting the boons (you get a buff after each year, pick one out of 3). Some said that they will cost me "favor" or something like that, but didnt understand what that means and whether theres a reputation system going on i didnt notice or theres some resource i didnt see. Again, the game needs to point at things and explain it better. To sum it up: + it looks great + its actually a lot of fun + its simplistic but also very deep + placement for buildings is important + effects are nice + music is fine (a bit too duddelidoodel for my taste but not bad) + gameplay loop is fun + theres enough to do and think about + didnt feel punishing when making mistakes which is good when starting out + looks like it will ramp up difficulty when i want to + worthy pricetag - no settings/options in main menu - more explanations and more informative tooltips (theres a "tutorial" infobox but i didnt feel like its sufficient) - enemies could bypass my walls for some reason and i dont know why (aka again the game needs to explain more) - Endless Mode isnt in yet - im not sure about longevity here, no meta progression, unlocks or late game goals (like a monument or something like that) -towers shooting dont seem to cause any sound. i would expect some boom from a cannon tower. Def. needs some proper sounds and more impact there. Its too silent and im missing some ambient sounds in general. This seems like a very very good and fun game for the first hour or so i spent. I took this as a "lets see if this is as good as the trailer suggests it is" and i was not disappointed at all. It surprised me positive in several regards, especially performance (i feared it would be the typical indie game that has "basic" graphics but runs bad with frequent drops once a single enemy appears). But also gameplay wise it was a very pleasant surprise. As of now my only major issue is that i have absolutely no idea whats going on and the main menu not featuring an options menu. Maybe the dev can sort that out a bit with some more info polish when adding endless mode. Possibly moving the tutorial button from the "escape" menu to the actual ingame UI would help (pack it next to the monsters compendium). This gem def. needs more attention. I hope it wont end up being burried under trash releases. If you like city building tower defense, pick this up, its great.

A pretty classy and well-looking tower defense / city planning game with quite an interesting take on pathfinding and resource management. Certainly deserves more recognition. Way better than your average TD stuff.

i really enjoy this game its difficult but not so much that i want to lower to difficulty or raise it, im playing on normal at the moment and its really fun the only thing i wish for is having my own little squads of guys to help slow them down.

TLDR: Interesting game that's worth a try, especially for something that seems to have popped up out of nowhere from a developer I've never heard about It's a nice little TD game that adds a bit of an economy. If you've enjoyed titles like Kingdoms & Castles, Thronefall or even the 2D Kingdom game, you will probably enjoy this. The tutorial was simple and gets the point across on how to get started. You'll probably have to play the first area once or twice on the normal difficulty (maybe once on the easy difficulty) to actually understand how the game plays. Camera/movement controls are not covered in the tutorial but if you play RTS games you'll figure it out quick (should still be added to the tutorial) Tower and building upgrades are also pretty straight forward and each building (including each wall tile) having a material maintenance cost is a good way to encourage expansion. I wasn't paying super close attention but it seemed like maybe the towers got more expensive to build as well? If so, I don't like that but increasing resource gain isn't hard. Definitely go ham on that early on if you can. I can't really talk about lore, didn't get that far into it. Overall, I think this is a decent game. There are lots of good things but there are still some areas that can be improved. The tutorial should probably include some details about building maintenance and cost (if it's there, I forgot) and [strike] I don't recall seeing how many rounds I have to get passed to win the area?[/strike] Figured it out, you have to complete the quests on the side. Wasn't sure what the impact of the quest was right way (I'm dumb). [strike] Maybe I missed understood the objectives [/strike] I did lol. Regardless, good game for $16 especially since it seems like it might run well on a potato while still looking good Final note to the developer: Make some YouTube videos, reddit posts and social media content to get your game some traction! Your game has a nice art-style, is chill and entertaining. The current lack of social media presence is going to result in lost sales potential and may be difficult to recover from now that the game has been released. The Steam Summer Sale may be your next big chance to get your games name out there, but it won't happen without a social media presence

First of all, I would like to start my review saying that I am not typically one to write long reviews, or give free PR. so me actually writing a semi lengthy review only a couple hours in already says a lot. This game is a Masterpiece. you can tell that a lot of hard work, dedication and love has gone into crafting this game. it really feels like the studio behind it has a love for games and has actually played some and not just controlled by some suits. the game as a whole is just adorable. the music, enemies, building designs all work together in harmony to create something magical. my favorite enemy so far, you meet on like the second level lol. the Tumblestone. this little guy happily rolls down hills and it is just so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ adorable every time i catch it happen. the way enemies travel around the map is very fun. you can direct them into towers fairly easily with walls once you get the hang of things. the terrain also plays an impact on decisions. cliffs, mountains, rivers all act as natural boundaries which makes for great strategic locations. resource management is very light, but necessary of course. dont think too hard about it. my first level, i took it way to seriously and was overwhelmed since the tutorial is very short. where you place your castle initially and the resource nodes around has far more to do with your eco than anything else. other than that, its very simple but fun! I appreciate the amount of lore so far, every mission has a skippable briefing explaining the where and why. if you are into tower defense games this is 1000% a buy, definitely has the ability to be TD juggernaut like Baloons or kingdom rush. I hope the devs keep up the good work and Cook up some awesome updates or another great game!

It's a beautiful game, so good looking that I honestly play just to build random towns and stuff. But the tower defense and gameplay itself is not so solid, mazing isn't guaranteed, some visual ambiguity with what cliffs are too high or scalable, or what water is able to become a path becomes very frustrating especially when enemy units spawn directly in your village or somewhere on the map without indications and then take a route to your keep. It's also a bit frustrating that the auto pathing feature and villages build willy nilly per season, and unclear if the manpower resource carries over between years after winter season. I don't even know if there's a tutorial on how to maze better or anything. But you can right click at various areas to see the pathing, it's just not guaranteed pathing since some units traverse walls or other things (cliffs and rivers). There may be even water traversing units that ignore water, but idk, didn't get super far into the game. So like it's not so kingdom buildy nor is it really tower defense centric, but the combat is tower defense and you do build buildings and towers. There's just a bit lacking with agency and pathing that makes it not so kingdom buildy nor tower defensey. It's a good mix, just needs more in my opinion. Game needs a little more polish to really be a Tower Defense, but overall it's so good looking that you go back into it thinking it's more of a cozy game. Lacks a meta progression unlock feature and relies on the story campaign to show you the ropes on playing as you unlock more things via story mode. Kinda wished it was RNG maps with rerolls and gave you some meta progression points for your next kingdom. The cards between years/seasons are cool and game-ify the roguelite aspects of RNG upgrades, but they don't heavy lean into it meta-progression wise which I think could give a better cohesive experience to create a rewarding gameplay loop for people that just like picking up a random town and going at it. Overall I recommend because we need more good looking games that experiment like this.

I've requested a refund. Based on the reviews of this game I thought it was going to be great! Especially the "this game is so under-rated" comments. But it's just not good. Its bare, boring and so basic. It's not worth the full price tag, play the demo before you buy it and get it on sale if you must.

genuinely a really solid game. I bought it on a whim, and do not regret it! I was pleasantly surprised for a game and dev team that came out of nowhere. although I am early in the game, i think a larger variety of buildings and defenses would be very nice. a terrain deformation option would be cool too, but it would definitely need balanced properly so it is realistic/not too OP

Several seasons worth of building walls and the enemies just kept going around even into out of bounds where I couldn't build walls.

After 2 hours of trying to clear the demo, I finished it and bought the full game. The game really opens up after the demo level. This really feels like the best in tower defense right now, as well as a fantastic combination of colony survival and tower defense strategy. After 30 hours, this is my favorite tower defense game right now. It's criminal that this game has gone so unnoticed! I love the peaceful music, and ambience while you're building. The level of challenge continues to rise at a nice pace.