Tower Escape

Gets boring quite quickly.

I really liked this game. Play it, you like it, I like it, we like it, me like it.

[h1]An interesting but very imperfect Reverse Tower Defense experiment[/h1] Tower Escape is a small indie game built around an interesting idea: instead of placing towers to stop waves of enemies, you send monsters through a tower-filled dungeon and try to make them reach the exit. Unlike [i]Anomaly: Warzone Earth[/i] (2011) that was marketed as Reverse Tower Defense but mostly felt like action/path-management games, Tower Escape does deserve the label. You are on the attacking side, you care about routes, enemy defenses, monster composition, and how to get your units through a hostile map. However, the game also shows how hard it is to make this concept really work. The main issue is that the strategic layer feels quite light. Before a wave, you choose your monsters and their path, but once the wave starts, there is very little to do. In my run, I only had one active card, a speed boost, and its use was almost automatic: wait until the last monster is out, then activate it. So most of the gameplay becomes choosing which monsters to buy and hoping the shop gives you something useful. The roguelike structure also makes experimentation harder than I would like. A run has 13 floors, with 2 or 3 waves per floor, but you can only fail twice before game over. That leaves very little room to test, vary, and refine your strategy. In a game about understanding defenses, I would have liked more opportunities to learn from each attempt instead of feeling pushed toward safe choices and RNG-dependent builds. The readability could also be better. For example, the danger level of a tile is shown with red coloring rather than clear numbers. When many heroes are attacking your monsters at once, it becomes hard to compare routes precisely and understand which path is actually better. That said, I still think Tower Escape is not uninteresting. It is quick to understand, has a neat core idea, and it tries something unusual. I finished my first successful run in Medium difficulty on my second attempt, and while I do not feel much desire to replay it, I am glad I tried it. So this is a cautious recommendation. Not because I think the game fully succeeds, but because it is a curious, slightly limited indie experiment with enough originality to be worth a look if the concept appeals to you. [h1]💖 Pros 💖[/h1] - Interesting Reverse Tower Defense premise - Easy to understand - Short runs - Some fun in finding a route through the defenses - A rare attempt at exploring this design space [h1]💀 Cons 💀[/h1] - Too passive during waves - Too much emphasis on RNG and roguelike structure - Very limited room for experimentation - Strategic depth feels lighter than the concept suggests - Danger/readability feedback could be much clearer - Not much reason to replay once you have seen the basic loop

Nice twist to the classic genre. Edit: it can be a very short game if beating the game once is the goal, beating it with all starting races can make the game a bit longer.

it's okay. the only run i did was fun. not for me though but i'm happy i played it!

Couple of runs in and here's my initial thoughts: Playable on Steamdeck once you play it on PC and figure out how to play it. You'll need to use a mix of controller and touchscreen to really play, which seems to be a theme in a lot of "dense" indie roguelites like this. Fun, interesting concept. Would benefit from clearer tutorials, but most importantly, really needs to have a way to display the enemy tower information in an easy to read way that doesn't involve hovering over everything. It's very easy to route poorly because to see tower info you have to mouse over a tower or spot to see them, rather than being able to see their overlapping fields readily. At $8 it's well worth it, I look forward to seeing what else this dev does.

Flee

Plays like an auto battler but with much more predictable and controllable outcomes. Between the 4 factions, numerous relics, gems, synergies and extra difficulties you get a decent amount of replayability before it starts to feel a little samey.

Fun reverse tower defense rogue-like. Simple to get into with a surprising amount of monsters, items and relics to chose from. Even after my 18 hours of play time and getting all the achievements, I have 60 unlocks yet to discover.

I never knew I needed this many maggots