Stop Santa - Tower Defense

Full review at: https://thegamehoard.com/2019/12/27/12-games-of-christmas-stop-santa-tower-defense-pc/ For all the things done poorly in Stop Santa – Tower Defense, it also shows that the tower defense genre has an inherent strength when its raw ingredients are at least decently balanced. You need to build and upgrade your towers in a way that keeps pace with your cash income from killing zombie elves, tougher enemies existing to ensure you’re at least balancing your layout well. The problem is, everything is just about the most basic of strategies, none of the towers or enemies packing any unique variables or behaviors. It’s all about the raw strength of what you can build versus the numbers and health bar sizes of incoming enemies. There is nothing wrong with the level designs or even these concepts if they were the basis of something that would later introduce greater complexity and variety, but these fundamentals are all Stop Santa – Tower Defense has across its nine levels, and it doesn’t bother to try and be anything more than them.

The game is okay, but it's not challenging at all. It has a lot of potential and is decent to play, but extremely short. I finished it the first time I played it, which was in .6 hrs. I earned all achievements, but one and I'm not interested in getting it. I'll probably never play it again. I would only recommend it if you're purchasing for your child, who is age 6 or so.

There's 9 levels, all of which are easy and can be Snowman towered to 5-stars easily aside from the last level. The last level is a bit harder in killing the one boss in the game, Santa. I couldn't beat it without using the two other tower types [grinding out the last achievement is how I've noticed]. There are only 3 tower types and what they do is hard to really tell. You can see their damage and rate of fire, but that's all you know. They don't seem to have additional effects like slowing or anything. You'll beat the game before even putting down 50 towers (at least I did) and there's a pointless achievement for placing 250 towers. Fun... each level is really short as well, so you can generally beat it with 3 towers upgraded. The sound effects are really annoying, the game is painfully slow without a speed up ability like most tower defense games have. And some levels the next set of enemies don't really come quickly there's an awkwardly long pause making you think the game froze. For some reason some of the levels have maps you can scroll up and down on. It's just such an odd design choice given that you don't really need the extra space they could've just fit it to the screen properly instead. The game doesn't show the range of each tower. And the towers aren't smart in their targeting priorities. It's not a huge deal as it's an easy and short game, but still. The menu for upgrading a tower can cover up the HUD of your money which is annoying at times. There's better tower defense games out there. It's not completely awful, it's just nothing special and unless you're really desperate for a new/cheap TD game to play there's no reason to play this. Short of wanting a loosely Christmas themed one. Given the enemies are zombies, it's not even really good for the holiday cheer either.