My recommendation for Nordhold is about 80% yes, because there are some important caveats.
Nordhold is a fairly fun rogue-lite tower defense game with a heavy emphasis on resource management. Each wave, you increase the path length by adding one large hex field onto the path, which opens up new areas to place towers, branching pathways that split the enemy's spawn locations, or other map features. There are nine towers at this time, from a long range Volcano Mortar, the short range melty beam Runestone, and my personal favorite chain-attacking Arc towers.
The most prominent feature in front of you on your Tower Defense map will be the topography range bonuses. When you have selected a tower to place, you will see some hex tiles with a number, from 1-4. Each number increases the range of the tower by a flat 0.5 hexes. For the Volcano Mortars, this is a fairly small improvement to their large base range, but is a massive improvement to short range towers like the Runestone or Frost towers. These topography range bonuses mark out the best spots to place towers, or to maximize their distance.
There are also other buff hexes, the one I see almost exclusively being the range hexes that increase a tower's range by a percentage. These hexes still gain the topography flat bonuses. Other buff hexes I've seen include a 50% damage increase, and automatically giving your tower 250% barrier damage.
There is a lot of fun in building up your tower placement and strategy within a run, as the Banner system asks you to focus on certain weapons in your arsenal.
However, there is a bit of a problem with the structure of the setup: your options for improving your defenses is greatly outmatched by the enemy creeps' scaling.
At base, a tower has improvement costs starting at 15 gold, which is a pretty hefty ask at the beginning of a run. For each wave a specific tower is on the map, that number decreases by 5. So older towers will eventually receive free buffs. Each time a tower is upgraded, the price resets to 15 gold +5 for each time that tower has had its level increased. There are a few abilities or upgrades that speed this process up, but generally it means that a level 4 tower needs 30 gold to upgrade.
Now, each upgrade to towers is fairly small. The core stats are damage, range, and fire rate, with each upgrade increasing these stats by 20% of their base value (arrow towers base damage is 110, each damage upgrade increases their damage by 22, etc). The other stats are crit chance, crit damage, accuracy, penetration, and barrier damage. these are always upgraded the same amount regardless of the tower. These upgrades are 10% for crit chance, 40% crit damage (all towers have base 180% crit damage), 25% accuracy and penetration, and 100% barrier damage. Accuracy cuts through Block, which is a chance for an enemy creep to ignore an attack, Penetration ignores a percentage of an enemies armor, which reduces the damage the enemy takes by a percentage, and barriers are special enemies that have a bubble shield that absorbs all damage that enemies within the bubble would take. The barrier breaks when the barrier enemy dies, or the barrier's health bar is depleted. Barrier damage is a multiplier of the tower's attack affects a barrier health bar. The exact numbers of Block and Armor are not explained very well, and are absolutely miniscule icons above an individual creep's health bar.
That's a lot to say about tower upgrades, and remember these are either happening infrequently (once every 3+ waves) or cost large amounts of gold (depending on the age of the tower). The first wave is basically 3 100 health creeps, and wave 10 will have a boss with 3k hp and dozens of 2-500 hp creeps. The enemies scale very fast, but your towers don't. It means that no individual tower is all that good, it is instead a numbers game: do I have enough towers to chunk down these waves over the length of the track? However, each tower you build increases the cost of that tower class, meaning you will quickly price yourself out of building another Arc Tower if you only build Arc Towers. However, banners encourage you to use a specific category of tower, meaning... The enemies' scaling demands having as many towers as possible, the cost of towers incentivizes diversifying your tower choice to keep your build prices reasonable, upgrading individual towers requires extreme resource generation or time that you don't have, and the banner system wants you to narrow in on a specific class of tower. These systems are pulling you in different directions, which can feel terrible if you simply aren't lucky.
Additionally, the towers are not particularly balanced. Shadow Towers have decent damage, average range, the 2nd best attack speed, fire multiple projectiles, and apply the weakness debuff which increases the damage enemies take. It's quite expensive, so it probably wouldn't be your first tower, but you can generally see the effects of Shadow Towers immediately.
Tornado Towers place a tornado on the enemy track that deals damage to all creeps that it passes over. However, it deals slightly more damage than a single projectile of Shadow towers, is lower range, lower attack rate, and has no inherent debuff. Tornado tower banners also feel pretty terrible. They can receive a stun effect, but even the legendary variant of this ability only lasts 0.7 seconds, and then the enemy cannot be stunned by another tornado tower for 10 seconds. Unless you have a godlike layout for slowing effects and your tornado tower's placement, a single Tornado tower will never stun the same enemy twice. They can receive a percentage increase to their (very low) damage based on the missing health of an enemy. Tornado towers are very good early, as they are good against low-health enemies and help when you get to later creeps that spawn superfast low-health enemies. However, there's no world where you can build around tornado towers. They simply don't have the base stats or upgrades to make that feel possible.
Fusion banners are acquired if you have 3 banners of two different towers, and those tower classes have a fusion category. Arc Towers and Tornado Towers don't have a Fusion, so they simply don't work together. Each fusion has 2 options, and they are occasionally awful.
For example, one of the fusions for Arrow+Arc is that Arc tower chain attacks will spread the Arrow tower's bleed debuff. That's pretty cool... Except if you don't have a banner giving your Arrow towers the bleed debuff. Some fusions are based on getting specific banners, and those fusions are useless if you didn't happen to get offered the banner in question.
One last small gripe I have with the game is how it is unkind with stacking upgrades. If you have a buff that gives a tower a 10% damage increase, that will not effect the flat value increases from upgrading individual towers. +10% dmg Arrow towers deal 121 damage, but the upgrades are still 22 instead of 24. However, [i] Percentage decreases to stats will reduce the flat values you receive. [/i] So if you get the banner for Arrows that decrease their damage to, let's say 50%, but fires in 3 shot bursts, the flat damage increase of upgrades will instead be 11. Percentage increases are applied exclusively to the base damage, but percentage decreases are applied universally across the tower. It's a very mean-spirited calculation.
Ultimately, the game is quite fun if you like tower defense games and resource management. While the tower diversity and unique upgrades are nice, they conflict with the scaling of the enemies and how building up your defense works. Some runs are simply doomed from the word go because you don't get high rarity or high quality banners, good hero abilities, viable relics, workable tower hexes, or favorable paths. I would still recommend it, as it's a pretty good game to chill out over, but I don't think you need to go out of your way to play it.
