Thronefall

Thronefall is a tower defense game where you defend your settlement against baddies. Each game is around 13 rounds where you get to plan your defenses during the day and you defend at night. The levels get progressively more complicated as they introduce more types of buildings and economic options. The main innovation is that in Thronefall you get to decide whether to use your funds to build defenses, do longer term upgrades or build more economic buildings to snowball into more money later on. This is a bit different than the typical formula where you get a fixed amount to allocate to only defense. With the mutators, which will introduce new challenges like stronger enemies or limit your building options, the game has surprising depth and you can make it as hard as you want to. You also unlock perks and other weapons which can make each game different. Unfortunately, the game also has issues with the main one being the controls. I get they are trying to be minimalistic in design, but they are off the mark. It's like they made a mobile game for the PC. Unlike every other tower game where you just click where you want to build, you need to run your hero over, then you need to hold a button to actually do anything. If you have build cost mutators you are waiting a few seconds each upgrade just waiting for the little circles to fill for no reason. Some maps are pretty big so you are running around to do basic things that a mouse can do in 2% of the time. For your hero to move fast you need to press the 'Run' button - why is this even in the game? There is zero downside to running (no stamina, to enemy detection, etc) so why wouldn't you just keep it active always? There are enemies that do AoE damage, so naturally you want to spread out your units. In this game you will want to tear your hair out. You cannot just click or drag select a group and move them. There are shortcuts to select entire groups, but if you want to move specific units around, you need to run your hero over, hold 'R' to go into selection mode, carefully move close enough to a few units then walk in a wide circle to avoid other units, then press R again at your destination. Then repeat for all your other units. Wow, I'm exhausted just typing that. I think this is summarized by how under 10% of people even finish the game (as per achievements). On the easiest mode (ie, no mutators) this game is very easy and it takes under 10 hours to beat. Compare this to something like Kingdom Rush where the completion rate is 40-50%+ over many more hours. I think they would both be considered "casual tower defense games." Said differently, this game looks interesting but is frustrating. You don't have enough agency in the minimalistic gameplay style and the vast majority of players drop it. As someone who a huge tower game fan and has played probably 100+ of them, the flaw in Thronefall is that the minimalistic style lends itself to be "casual" which is totally incongruent with the mutator, etc system. No serious player is going to slog through the horrendous UI and learn all of the weird quirks of which enemy (many of which look identical) does what and the perfect counter, etc. This leaves the game not attracting serious players, but losing casual players as it's too complicated. I'm going to finish the slog to get all the achivements since I'm a completionist, but will not be recommending to other tower defense fans. If you are dedicated, play something like Bloons or Gemcraft, or if you are casual play Kingdom Rush. Overall 4/10.