I need to preface this review with the mantra of “Simon needed to get good but didn’t really manage it”. It is the key thread that runs throughout Bioguard, though. It’s a hardcore tower defence game that gives you limited tools, hard as nails enemies, and very specific upgrade trees that are so finely balanced, it turns Bioguard into a puzzle game more than a strategy. Allow me to explain…
Bioguard is a medical and germ-themed tower defence game. The enemies are different bio nasties travelling along different vein paths to attack exits or body parts. They all have health bars that can be categorised into red, blue and green damage. The more annoying the enemy, the more likely they’ll have multiple health bars, meaning you’ll need to strip one away before getting to the next. Whilst enemies are plentiful, tower types are not. There are only four and each has a specific duty. Troops do red damage and a tiny bit of blue and green damage, but are killed easily and have respawn times that allow enemies to walk through untouched. Arrow attacks are slow, have a huge range, and do massive amounts of red damage but little else. The water volcano does blue damage, whilst the bomb factory does green damage. There is very little crossover, and that’s where a large portion of Bioguard’s difficulty comes from.
Each wave is a surprise first time around as the game never tells you what is coming wave to wave. Most levels have multiple paths, and as money to buy and upgrade towers is tight, choosing the exact placement that works for the current wave is crucial. All too often you’ll place green towers down for green enemies in one wave, only to have blue enemies appear next wave. Later in the game, when enemies arrive with multiple health bars, they’ll swap what needs to be cleared first, meaning your big investment in upgrading one type of tower becomes quite useless very quickly. Selling and redeploying help, but money is always tight.
This is where the meta progression of Bioguard holds a powerful key to success. If you clear a level, you are awarded DNA to spend on the skill tree. This is required to unlock level 2 or 3 upgrades for the four towers (or unlocking them to be used at all in some cases) and any attached variations. A critical power-up card to buy with DNA is a “get a level 3 tower for the cost of a level 1”. Then, you’ll need to rely on luck that the cards you take into battle (yes, we have some roguelike cards at play here) are handed to you early in the game rather than waiting for a later round to hand one of your cards over. Levels are designed in such a way that if you don’t gain the maximum amount of DNA on previous rounds, you’ll likely not unlock the right set of upgrades for the next level to then maximise that, and by level 6, Bioguard’s difficulty shoots up to the point where you cannot continue until you perfect the earlier levels… and this became my problem.
All too often, levels started to feel like “guess the sole developer solution” to what, on the surface, looks like a more creative game. Every level forced me to refund and respec my entire upgrade tree, and whilst that isn’t a pain in itself, the constant guesswork to match the developer’s intent became frustrating. Some of that is down to me not being as good as the game demands, but some of it is down to the luck of which card unlocks at the start of each wave so you can survive long enough to upgrade something. The constant going back to redo levels with more DNA unlocks felt a bit overkill, too.
Aside from that, Bioguard is quite appealing. The fact that I slogged away for hours trying to crawl my way through the game says something about its “one more go” addictive nature. The graphics are stylised and bitty, but get the job done, and the audio is serviceable. I just don’t think Bioguard fully values the player’s time and stretches out its limited tools with artificial difficulty curves and fog of war approaches that make your first run on every wave a total fact-finding mission. If you enjoy your tower defence games more hardcore, grab this. Just take a calming sound bath before you get stuck in!
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