I've been on a tower defense kick recently and bought seven tower defense games at once; Technotron is the first out of the batch I played. It was cheap and I was attracted to its bright retro aesthetic.
In terms of tower defense, Technotron is the barest minimum. If, like me, you found your love for tower defense by playing browser TD games two decades ago, you'll find Technotron is nostalgic of the era and has nothing new to add, nor does it do well at the bare minimum. The retro aesthetic makes it hard to differentiate one type of tower from another, not to mention one upgraded tower versus its lower-tiered brethren. Waves start, come and go, and lives are taken without any indicator at all, oftentimes making it hard to make sense of the neon mess on screen. Upgrades are standard (+ to damage, range, etc.) and don't seem to help enough to justify the cost.
Technotron is the type of TD game where you can set towers and/or walls down to block certain paths and make enemy pathways longer. The amount of money you start with is so low that any strategy utilizing this is slow to start and even slower to develop (as you'll want to upgrade towers to defeat increasingly harder enemies before you can afford to buy towers/walls to block paths). There's no indicator to show you when a tower is ready to upgrade; you have to click through each one to figure out if you can afford to make it better. There's also no indicator for when you unlock new towers, nor which buttons control what. For example: I clicked pause at the beginning of a level to plan my strategy and figure out what the towers were, and the wave started anyway. I later found out I had paused [i]the music[/i], not the game. The soundtrack's pause button is in the top right corner of the screen, where most TD games have their control commands.
Let's talk about the bugs, which have been mentioned in other reviews. For an excessively simple game, Technotron has a lot of them. Waves fail to spawn. Menus get stuck. Most egregiously, halfway through a level my mouse input stopped working. Literally everything I tried to click on had no response. I couldn't upgrade towers, pause the game, or do anything but go to the menu, so I lost the level after spending time and energy setting up my strategy. That's when I decided my time with Technotron was done.
Out of nearly 1600 games in my library, Technotron Defense is only the second I've refunded. The soundtrack is decent if you like 80s synth music (I do), but I didn't buy the game for its soundtrack, nor will I hear it if the game itself isn't good enough to spend time in. Unlike many gamers, I don't need my tower defense games to add new things to the genre in order to play and love them. Technotron doesn't, but it also doesn't excel at the standard or even manage to work up sufficient excitement, particularly considering its myriad of bugs and issues. This game gets a hard pass from me.
