Terrorhedron Tower Defense is an older game from 2014. It's a venerable 10 years old at the time of this review. As the title says, this is a tower defense. You put down a bunch of "towers" and then enemies walk by the towers on a fixed path. You have to place the towers right, upgrade them and so on, to stop all the enemies effectively.
It strikes me as less of a dedicated professional game development and more of an experiment or tech demo to see how a tower defense game could be made. It's definitely a TD game and there's some welcome depth in the tower progression, but the game itself is half baked, untextured low poly primitive polygons. Practically zero effort implementation.
The game is very simplistic, small and limited in scope and ambition. This feels more like a tech demo, proof of concept or student homework assignment rather than a fully fledged product designed for PC gamers. As such it doesn't offer any real value as a serious PC game.
We have this dischordant dichotomy, where the game itself is fleshed out with various levels and so on, and phoned in graphics. That's what leads me to think this is just a demo or an experiment. A bad experiment... introducing perhaps too much depth to a tower defense game, and worse, you have to grind some of the levels again and again to get the right upgrades so you can do future levels. What a terrible idea!
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 lazy minimalist/untextured low-polygon "retro" assets and visuals, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the early 1990s. The lack of textures is a method that lazy devs often use to disguise their lack of talent/interest in doing the graphics properly and trying to disguise it under the name of "art", or "We made it look bad on purpose", which really isn't something gamers should have to put up with. It's unclear why the developers weren't willing to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets and high resolution textures for the game. It looks bad as a result of their decisions, and that's just another reason to avoid it.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Terrorhedron Tower Defense is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
