Revenge of the Titans

It SHOULD be fine and a great tower defense, BUT: - Half the map is dark, because of a fade to black effect on quite a wide margin near the borders. On the area you'll probably want to build turrets to ambush the spawning titans. Or grab powerups. Either way, good luck seeing what you're doing. - Any earned money carries over to next missions. HOWEVER, the game features a very aggressive difficulty rubber-banding - the more money you have, the harder the missions become. Do extremely well, and enemies become fast enough to make winning impossible until you give in and ask for easier levels (which ruins your chances for a gold medal). - No minimap, no zoom out, AND no moving the screen when paused. - The cursor hotspot pixel moves on its own and in a different speed from the visible mouse cursor. Hard to notice, but you can't unsee it once you do.

A tower defense game with some interesting ideas that make it feel quite different from other games in the genre. The major differences are free form pathing, large open maps, finances that carries over from mission to mission, towers that can be destroyed (even by your own towers), tower modifying buildings, alien personalities that can cause them to attack recklessly or try and avoid strong defenses, a tech system that has many prerequisites and an overall weird personality and unique graphic style. Maybe all these aren’t new, but seeing so many risky differences in one game is pretty unique. Beyond that, it is what you expect. Protect your base from all the alien waves and complete all the missions. The positives are the uniqueness more than anything. I appreciate that they took some risks and made a fresh take on the genre… even if all the ideas don’t pan out so hot. In fact, if I were making my own tower defense game, I would consider many of these features. Unfortunately, the actual implementation and overall design, just ruins most of this uniqueness. The negatives are many for me, unfortunately. Although I like the idea of free form pathing and larger maps, I did not like the implementation. The maps can get large, but you can’t zoom out to actually get a good idea of what is going on. Nor do you know what aliens will be coming really, so trying to build defenses can just be guesswork. You do see the spawn points, but no clue what is coming from them. The game also has some baffling oversights like not being able to get info on the aliens during the mission. You will get little summaries of new aliens coming premission, but correlating them to what you see during a mission isn’t so easy. You don’t even get to know how many aliens are coming. These things lead to you doing a practice run or two for most missions (except earlier ones which are easy and there are few spawn points). Then the fact that your towers can be destroyed, often means you cannot put towers further out unless they have protection. But the game usually has so many entry points, and so little available money, that you can rarely do anything but have 1 or 2 big clumps of turrets (especially later in the campaign). And things like your towers being able to damage your own buildings was just a horrible idea, at least for the turret and map designs that they have. The rocket launcher, in particular, can easily do more damage to you then the enemy. Even putting it way out, somehow it kills itself as it hits some little tiny piece of terrain (there is lots of randomish terrain in this game). Then there is the economy. Again, interesting idea to have your left-over money carry over, but this can lead to you winning missions and auto failing the next because you can’t build anything. And if you do really well and have a huge surplus? Well, the game punishes you by making the mission harder. Then there is the little item drops that happen frequently. Mostly these happen off screen and you just get the direction and a beep that helps tell how close you are, and you have to scroll around to try and find it. Horrible idea in an already hectic game. Yes, missing these isn’t the end of the world, but some of those drops are super weapons that will really help you out and they carry over between missions. There is even a manually targeted turret (which is quite effective), which is really out of place. Yes, target aliens manually, while picking up loot drops, and also trying to make sure your defenses are holding and don’t need any support. Then we have the graphics, which are unique, but they aren’t the easiest to see clearly as they are all black. This is especially bad late in the game where the levels are very dark. And, with the tech, there are some that are more or less required. With the prerequisites and not always good warning, you can just auto lose if you didn’t get the right ones but there is a respec in the game now so it’s recoverable (I guess at one point that did not exist though). Again, just some odd choices here. There are actually other things I don’t like too but they are more minor and I’ve gone on long enough. End result, yeah not a recommend for me. This just isn’t what I want from a tower defense game. I want to be able to plan a layout, sit back and see how it holds up, and occasionally add some new defenses, use a power or upgrade some stuff. This game is hectic, hard to predict, hard to tell how you are doing or what you are doing wrong, etc. You can even, many times, just brute force your way through a mission by using super-weapons / powerups, no real strategy at all. I just did not find this game fun or satisfying at all, even though I powered through (with a years long break and restart). Good ideas, but poor execution in my opinion.