Mixing deep roguelike progression by allowing customisation, decision making and chance to steer each run, Towerful Defense is an excellent tower defence game with a twist. It gives you just one tower and 360 radar to strike attacks and augment your stats to survive waves of aliens coming to invade you. It might not look like much but the beauty is in the detail.
The premise is much like a radar system where a single tower must survive 20 waves of aliens that culminate in a giant overpowered mothership boss. Each wave brings more aliens with new tricks to fend off too and you do that by picking your first main ability. Usually your tower will always have a turret gun but your first main weapon of choice will steer your run too. You could use a samurai sword that spins around the tower, a virus that infects aliens weakening them but making them faster and more deadly if they reach you, or you could go for extra turrets or maybe a freeze or lightning strike. Whatever you choose you’ll be able to add two other weapons later on and decide if you want to manually trigger them after their cooldown or to set automated parameters of when they trigger themselves. Want them to focus on faster enemies or ones closer to the tower? Then use the sliders to change their auto behaviour. Its a great system that allows you sit back and watch your commands if you don’t want to button mash.
As you kill aliens you’ll earn XP and cash and both are used between waves to augment and improve your tower stats. It is here where the real detail unfolds. Towerful Defense takes the Brotato approach to upgrades, giving you lots of choices but each one comes with positives and negatives. You can improve fire rate or cooldown times but it’ll reduce your XP gain. Or it could be you trade some health points for some armour. Perhaps you’ll buy a 4th weapon but doing so reduces the power of the other three by 40%. Every blessing has a curse and you can choose to lean into certain stats for angular builds that have one incredibly strong weapon, or you can try to be more balanced. I found myself investing in cash generation improvements so I could buy more upgrade cards to mitigate the curses many upgrades bring. The other big investment I recommend is HP regeneration because the end boss is a huge step up in difficulty – you’ll need it to survive its attacks when it crashes into your tower. Put simply, there’s hundreds of choices and possibilities and by the time you’ve got a weapon combo and then started choosing upgrades, runs start to feel different.
There are different towers to choose from too, with each having 6 difficulty levels. One tower never recovers any health but starts with 500, whereas all other towers start with around 20 but can gain more or regenerate. To gain access to the next difficulty level, you need to clear the previous one and doing so earns you talent points. These give meta progression across the game to give a tiny boost on a stat or two of your choosing but their impact is minimal. The developer says its to stop players grinding to win rather than using strategy but the talent points just didn’t feel impactful at all during my playtime. There is also something called glitch which I assume increases the likelyhood of getting special upgrades with wild stats but during all the hours of playtime I’ve had to date, I never received a glitched card that made it obvious what glitch really does. I could be totally wrong with my understanding though.
Those two niggles are very minor sidebar issues though as the main game doesn’t require them and I lost hours just trying out different builds to see what worked well and what didn’t. Towerful Defense has all the experimentation of Brotato’s upgrade system, housed in a tower defence game. It sounds odd but it works surprisingly well and the radar inspired graphics work well too. As your tower starts to fend off an overwhelming sea of enemies slowly filtering in, the game feels tense and the minimalistic radar design conveys all the drama clearly and effectively.
If you are looking for a different take on tower defense games, this is one I’d absolutely recommend. Its a fine rabbit hole to descend down into. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you first. If you ever reach the bottom, endless mode will have you covered too with complete global modifiers to make the game even harder. I didn’t need that challenge though – my hands were full already. Great fun.
Review copy provided by developer. Towerful Defense: A Rogue TD is out on Steam.
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