[strike]Recommended with serious caveats.[/strike]
Update: meh. now encountering significant bugs and game is abandoned afa dev is concerned. bugs in conjunction with dwindling patience as i suffer the QoL travesty described below, I've changed my review to "not recommended". Sad. :(
Bugs: 1) one of the most significant turrets (Energy Vac) is not working correctly, at least afa the game says it's supposed to work. 2) achievements triggering wonkily. i haven't really been tracking them closely, but i just played a session in which an achievement popped for something i accomplished at least 1 session ago. and it wasn't anything explicable, like, it popped on bootup; it randomly popped in the middle of a game. Sry, I got no time for broken achievements.
i hate nondeterministic TD games. WTF? (i.e. when you do the exact same thing and the results are different. And trust me, with no save/checkpoint function, I *know* i'm doing the exact same thing, all 250 times. :/ it [i]usually[/i] comes out the same, but not always. dreck.)
Additionally, presents one of the cardinal sins of achievements in general: unlocking "harder" version of a level doesn't unlock all the lower achievements. Downright misanthropic.
But wait! The achievements don't even unlock for the correct map. Facepalm and shake my damn head.
One map has a turret base you can't even build on, because it blocks the path. That's the level of QA... not enough, prerelease, and evidently none, post-release.
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[h3]Now let's zoom out a little, to the state of the game industry, and [i]games[/i], in general.[/h3]
Per their remarks on this game's forum, this dev has gone on to work on other much more visible and mainstream titles. Did they learn their lessons? IDK, and I'm not about to pay money to find out. We wonder why "games suck nowadays", and it's because of this -- they are allowed to be made by unskilled people who should have got their dev card pulled after their first release. So, consider Stormworks and Carrier Command 2 *HIGHLY* suspect, as this game-breaking hack has been involved with both of them. (Too bad cuz stormworks looked cool for a min, but -- unsurprisingly -- bad feedback in forums made me decide that one needed to stay in the oven a bit longer before I buy. Well, now I know why! :(
Furthermore, this all shows how broken the steam review system is, when critically flawed trash like this can get a "very positive" score. SMDH.
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Orig review follows:
Fun, but unfortunately extremely bare-bones, and makes itself very un-fun by neglecting many features considered "standard", today. Consequently, it feels like a beta or an abandoned homework project. :(
With the exception of
1) a speedup feature
2) the ability to save and recall camera angles
It is [u]absolutely devoid of QoL[/u].
I mean... there's not so much as a "restart level" function. You have to "quit to main menu", wait for a 3-second splash screen to finish (oy!), then remake the game, re-specify your settings, etc. Wow.
Checkpoints? Savegames? You must be joking.
Camera manipulation sucks.
1) the mouse buttons are bound backwards, relative to what is normal today. It's left-click to rotate, right-click to pan (aka "move").
(And by this point in the review, you didn't expect to be able to rebind keys, did you? There are literally 4 usable options (also a 5th for anaglyph 3d. cute but frivolous in light of the rough edges elsewhere): Player name, music vol, fx vol, and fullscreen y/n. Oy. Also thanks for FX vol but too bad the individual sounds are improperly mastered. There's big difference in volume so turning down for the loudest makes the quiet ones kinda too quiet. BTW some different turrets use the same sound effect. WTF is going on here? A beta, that's what.)
2) rotate -- is wonky. seems like there are constraints in some cases -- i.e. it won't rotate quite the way you expect -- and the inconsistency is frustrating.
3) "you can use mousewheel to zoom" ... if u don't mind having to literally roll it a couple hundred clicks to zoom where u want. The scaling is so "off" on this. Sheesh. Feels untested, and unloved. Luckily we have WASD to also move the camera, and W/S zoom in and out much faster than mousewheel. Still everything subject to the clunkiness described above.
There are certainly more gripes, most relatively minor (yet still give a feeling of "this is lacking"), but I'm honestly not trying to beat up on this, cuz it's fun. These major flaws and oversights tho, are just tragic.
A $2 game that's aggravating to play, is not a good value. (I'm sure I got it on bundle. Playing cuz I'm a bored TD fan and achievement chaser.)
It would actually be amazing with a QoL pass. As is it's pretty sad. Oh well.
