This garbage minimum viable product comes across as a shovelware cash grab... something just "enough" to get published on Steam with a price tag on it. There's no indication this was ever made as a sincere game for gamers, and that's a problem.
At face value this is just one of the worst "tower defense" games ever made, but it lacks any of the clever design elements of nuance that other, more seriously made TD games have (Kingdom Rush is a fine example). Instead you just freely place your "towers" (gun emplacements) and enemies move in a straight line from right to left. The towers don't last long so you're frequently replacing them. The enemies don't follow a path or track, they just start at a random spot on the right side of the screen and go in a straight line to the left where you shoot them. That's all there is to this.
In fact I would go so far as to say this is so bad that it's what I would expect you would get if you asked ChatGPT to create a Tower Defense in GameMaker Studio for you. The game predates AI though, so I guess we'll have to conclude it's just bad.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, and it's hard to say if this is due to the age of the assets used, if it's a deliberate attempt for the game to look bad/retro on purpose, or if the assets are just, well, terrible looking. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game in 2026, such poor quality 2D graphics in the 3D era just aren't good enough, whether it's a deliberate design fault on behalf of the developer or they just couldn't manage to do any better, this is a compromise gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.
A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Jl Apps has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.
This looks and feels like a mobile app, but I wasn't able to find it on the app stores. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).
Regardless, for all intents and purposes Limit of defense might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.
Those technical issues put this game beneath what is expected from a contemporary, professionally developed PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was [b]only 2 players[/b]. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 130 million gamers on Steam and well over 140,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
Next is pricing and value. Is this game worth buying from among the 140,000+ games on Steam?
Limit of defense is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. On top of the base price, there's $1 USD in soundtrack DLC. Selling the soundtrack separately when it's already included in the game is an attempt to charge gamers twice for the same content.
The quality problems and defects with this game makes the asking price totally unrealistic. It's impossible to recommend this to gamers here on Steam.
