[b][h1]Turtle Riders[/h1][/b]I bought this game on a whim after watching a YouTube video on it, In concept it's a really neat idea, a moving tower defence game with micro-management. But the dev cared too much about making the game difficult rather than making it fun or balanced. It's ridiculously overtuned to where most upgrades become useless and you are forced into one working build.
[b][h2]Gameplay[/h2][/b]You are a walking tower where you can switch between combat and resource gathering, your tower shoots on it's own but switching is useful to hit specific enemies, you micro-manage collecting resources to upgrade your turtle through 3 zones each with their own mini-boss, between rounds you can upgrade and play mini-games to regain health, gain meta-currency and gain extra exp. There are a handful of weapons and turtles to unlock but ultimately not a lot was added after launch.
The upgrade tree for the turtle is pretty cool with different paths that allow for different bonuses, but it's the exact same every run, it would've been so much more interesting if each turtle had a unique upgrade tree.
The 1st zone is piss easy, contrasted by the 2nd zone absolutely kicking your ass, it's a constant battle of attrition, drained to low HP with few ways to heal fast, the 3rd zone is the exact same but with even stronger enemies. There seems to be this feature where one enemy is chosen per zone to have a mega-buffed spawn-rate which leads to this horrible RNG of having a wave of the most annoying enemy bombard you all at once, dooming the run.
RNG is prevalent in too many aspects of the game:
[list]
[*]Getting this mega-buffed enemy
[*]Getting unlucky with upgrades
[*]You can get forced negative upgrades from chests
[*]The amount of resources you get is random
[*]Your shots missing enemies
[*]Your damn abilities activating at the wrong time and missing
[/list]
Not all of these are terrible in isolation, but when it's all of these, every run, every time, it is not fun.
Given that you are swarmed with enemies regularly you need to be able to keep up with them so they don't get out of control, this makes slow-firing weapons unbalanced, the crossbow took me maybe 15 attempts to win a run, taking all attack-speed upgrades every time, I only ending up winning because I went for a build that just absolutely spams the enemy with abilities, with essentially no help from the crossbow. The weapons are all just the same thing but with different stats, meaning some are inherently worse, there are only 3 weapons with actual unique traits.
The meta-upgrades and meta-currency are not thought out well, the upgrades range from less than useless to... useless, each level giving a 2 % stat bonus that does nothing, it doesn't help that this is a global currency, so you need it to unlock new weapons/turtles, it's used for rerolling in runs and to buy heals at shops, if you want to win a run with the worst weapons you are forced to spend 90% of your meta-currency during the run itself, leaving little to actually upgrade with, a meta-upgrade that adds free rerolls would solve this.
Very frequent Bugs that need to be fixed:
[list]
[*]Upgraded apples fall through the floor when picked up together
[*]Tabbing out of the game at the wrong time can cause all menu's to be bricked, including shop and pause menu.
[*]During the fishing mini-game and through menu popups you are able to click continue which pushes you into the next area before you are done with the shops.
[*]Purchasing new weapons and turtles resets your meta-currency to 0 despite having a defined cost.
[/list]
[b][h2]Achievements (29/29)[/h2][/b]Winning with every weapon/turtle is ridiculous because of how overtuned the game is, you practically can only run 1 build for for most weapons as some are wildly unbalanced, you will be left to grind the remaining few meta-upgrades for the final achievement.
[b][h2]Settings/Accessibility/Misc[/h2][/b]Endless Leaderboards available. 11 languages supported. Keyboard, mouse and gamepad support.
[b][h2]TL;DR[/h2][/b]Extremely frustrating, unbalanced and overtuned moving tower defence game. Great concept, terrible execution. Too much RNG. Weak meta-progression. Lots of bugs. Difficult/Grindy achievements.
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