I love tower defense games, been playing them since the first starcraft mods, lately Warstone TD, Gemcraft Series and of course Kingdom Rush + Frontiers. I couldn't resist buying this TD game with 50% discount.
Good:[list]
[*]There is a wide variety of towers (including flame, ice, laser) and clearly, some are much better for certain levels or placement spots than others, e.g. obviously placing the AoE towers in front and the hard-hitting single damage towers towards your base to pick of runners or the heavily armored foes that get through the slaughter, also it's very satisfying to place a few flame towers on a very long path and watch the enemies just slowly burn to a crisp as they try to get through a mile of burning hell.
[*]There is an even bigger variety of mostly flashy and very effective spells that cost mostly mana and sometimes gold, including fire tornadoes, blizzards, flash freeze, traps, mass repair.
[*]You get exp for every enemy slain and are totally free to distribute skill points balanced on new towers and tower upgrades as well as into the opposite skill path of better and crazier spells and mana upgrades, or you could go down just the path you like more, everything seems to work.
[*]Extremely customizable with lots of shortcuts you can allocate, different difficulties and even the option to switch tower damage on or off. Some enemies can damage your towers and you have to repair them, which is imho how this game should be played and is balanced around, but some won't like the added fuss, so just switch it off and at least play on the hardest difficulty then to offset this, otherwise you'll just swim in gold and have no way to spend it. Also lots of graphics options.
[*]The graphics overall are very detailed and the levels, towers, enemies and especially the spell effects are obviously lovingly crafted. With a Ryzen 5 2600 and a 1070 I can maintain 144 fps at 1440p on maxed out settings only when no enemies are on the screen, for fluid gameplay during large waves I had to scale back.
[*]You can quickly switch between three different game speeds so you can micromanage in difficult situations and accelerate the boring parts.[/list]
Neutral:[list]
[*]The graphics to me look a bit sterile, in the way that Age of Empires looks sterile when compared to Warcraft. The game is aiming for a more realistic look, the main problem with this imho is that the enemies are really hard to tell apart as they have no big exaggerated features.
[*]There's no world map. It's not a big deal for me and the mission list does its job, but some immersion is missing because of this.
[*]The story is very basic. I don't expect a twisting, complicated, intruiging storyline for a TD game obviously, so it's no biggie.[/list]
Can and should still be optimized / changed:[list]
[*]The area you can scroll around in is severely restricted, and worse, when you zoom in, you can't scroll farther to the edges, you're still stuck at the same x,y-coordinates that are the boundaries when zoomed out, meaning you'll always have to play on maxed zoomed out setting, otherwise you can't see a large part of the inbound enemies until they're standing right at your first towers.
[*]When frame rates drop, scrolling gets choppy and slower, so getting around the big maps (and you have to when surveying all the enemy paths) feels like a chore. At least include a scroll speed setting please.
[*]Tying into this, sounds get much louder when you're zoomed in and very low when zoomed out. This is realistic but bad design in this case, as you're almost always zoomed out and the combat sounds are almost inaudible while the UI sounds and music stay at full volume, so you're almost shocked every time you get an error sound because the spell you want to use is still on cooldown. Also, you feel very detached from the fighting on the ground when you can barely hear it, which adds to the sterile overall feel.
[*]There are still some typos in the descriptions and unit names (e.g. a quick look in the bestiary yields "beserker", "presense", "in it's path" instead of "in its path", ...)[/list]
Overall, it's worth the price, because it's quite different from most TD games with a very impactful, interesting skill tree and great 3D graphics with rotatable maps and impressive, satisfying spells that make you really *feel* like a godlike mage. I'll continue playing through it, but don't expect an extremely long, balanced and polished game, this one has different strengths. Not to say that it couldn't be quite a bit better with a few more updates still :)[/list]
Edit after finishing this game: The last campaign, defending against the undead, is distinctly better than the first two thirds of the game. The more dramatic and memorable orchestral score was a nice contrast to the nondescript background music earlier. The snow effect is very well done and adds some atmosphere. And, not least, the difficulty really ramps up the last few levels. You'll always have to be on the lookout for Shadows running through and stunning all your towers, and use every tool at your disposal to stop them early. Which also highlighted the problem with the near indistinguishability of most units, as it would be nice to see them at a glance when panning around instead of trying to find them by looking near your stunned towers...
But overall, it was fun playing through it and I recommend Hold the Fort, although I don't see me restarting on the highest difficulty.
