izigame.me

The quintessential tower defense game.
I never thought of myself as a fan of tower defense games. Apparently, I only had experience with basic or bad ones. This game is absolutely phenomenal in all aspects, and I can’t believe how well they made this game. I decided to play it randomly over the holidays to get through my backlog, and I quickly got hooked and played it all the way through over my time off, even buying all of the DLC during the annual Steam holiday sale.
The Positives:
-The game is extremely well designed. Everything about it: the pace of the game in regular and fast-forward mode (and the fact that they have a fast-forward mode), the graphics, the tower abilities, the maps, the enemies, and the difficulty as well as the game balance. The controls are even perfect. This game should be a study for any game designer on how to make a game that works as well as possible and plays wonderfully. It even saves at checkpoints to respect your time and allow you to go back and try a different strategy midway instead of having to reproduce the same strategy and fast-forward to get to the same point to try something else. Just amazing.
-This game sucks you in and gives you the perfect amount of challenge. Like the NFL balancing teams so that as many games as possible come down to the wire and keep audience’s interest, this game comes down to the wire so often in every wave. When you first try a strategy, it might work or might not. It might work early but fail later due to more or different enemy numbers or variations. And the entire game is trying to get you to figure out the best approach and then execute it frantically in real time as you make moment-by-moment decisions as to whether or not to place a tower (vs. earn interest for future towers), which tower to place, where to place it, and when exactly to place it so that you don’t miss out on DPS while it is being built/upgraded. In fact, the resource system forces you to be constantly looking at the enemies and balancing whether you can survive the wave without placing a tower, so you are constantly on watch.
-The thing that makes this game the best tower defense game that had been made to date is that the other games I’ve played of the genre were more about setting up a strategy and then letting it run. This game has a mode that’s similar to that (10K/20K/40K resource challenges where you can build everything up front if you wish), and if you build it all at once and then wait, it quickly becomes boring. How they understood that and made it so that you have to watch patiently through each wave and adjust your strategy continuously, I’ll never know…but it is the secret. And here I thought for most of the game that I hated having to place gun towers early for resource efficiency (more on that in a moment), but when I tried the challenge modes and built the perfect defense up front (or, worse, built a defense that worked until the final 1-5 waves), and I found myself letting it run while I did other things to just wait for the outcome. What you think you want is not always what you actually want or need, I guess.
-The story and voice acting are nice. They’re not the strongest parts of the game (and they’re near non-existent in much of the DLC map packs), but that’s comparing them to phenomenal and so I’m not saying they’re bad at all. With them, I felt a sense of evolution and connection between maps and not just a series of challenges; without them, it wouldn’t have felt like a campaign. I will say that the Portal DLC is amazing—it really captured the spirit of Portal without them having to redo all of the towers or enemies.

The Negatives
-These are all going to be nitpicks because this game is so good. The first is that some of the towers seem to be hit or miss. For example, the Meteor tower seems to miss a lot, whereas the other towers seem to be near-100% accurate with only the occasional “Shoot the damn thing!” moments. And because you can always win with a better strategy, the near misses never seem too bad even if one or two felt cheap (“What are you doing?!?!?!? One more shot, and I would’ve won!”) because I know that I can always try something different for a different result. The Tesla tower took a while for me to get used to, and the concussion one is hard to lock down which enemies it utterly destroys and which it won’t really hit.
-I found that in many cases I could get a gold with just the gun towers, which frustrated me sometimes as I wanted to use a variety of towers but, due to the early-wave resource limitations, I was stuck with guns and then just kept finding myself buying more and more gun towers. Not to mention the fact that I’d try an approach that used a variety of towers in fun ways that was terrible when I could’ve just used all guns at the front and won easily. Now, on one hand I’m glad that they let you do fun combinations like repeaters. I played another tower defense-like game where you couldn’t do fun combinations like all of one type. And this game is similar in that you can’t, say, do all concussion towers because you can’t beat the big guns. But the gun tower is all-purpose, which in many respects makes it the only one you need most of the time if you can create a “kill box” of gun towers with a temporal in the middle. But I will say, I loved the DLC, which made you use lesser-used towers like Missile towers and, for the Portal DLC, a level where you can win with almost all Tesla towers. So it’s just a minor thing.
-100%ing the achievements takes well over 100 hours (150 mission completions for one of the achievements!). It might take the fun out of it to play the same level almost ten times (I’d often forget which challenge I was doing and would have to remember what the restrictions and gold requirements were), but the positive is that the changes make you use different strategies.
-Speaking of which, the math is really easy: it’s cores plus sell value of towers plus existing resources, so why they didn’t allow you to see your score vs. the gold level in the pause menu is strange (or they could’ve just told you how many resources you needed to have to hit the score threshold). Maybe there was no good way to implement that since you get thousands of points at the end and so it would be meaningless for most of the level.
-The laser damage is my most frustrating. Because they will have shielded enemies and fast enemies come out at the same time, so you’re really screwed there. If you put laser towers early, you deal 0 damage to the shield enemies. But if you put laser towers too late, there’s not enough damage-over-time damage done to kill them before they run through the exit. So I almost never used laser towers since gun towers did nearly the same damage with zero un-hittable enemies, but that meant that my biggest weaknesses were the fast enemies that couldn’t be hit enough without laser DOT and the big enemies where the DOT would help wear it down while it was out of tower range. So that was the worst part of the game for me for some reason (I think I hate the idea that if my gun tower is “distracted” and doesn’t shoot the shield off, the laser will do zero damage and my perfect run is over).
-Why doesn’t the flight path stay lit for as long as the entry and exit signs, and why doesn’t it reappear when you restart the level? I found out later that there's a button to toggle it on or off at least.

Overall, however, this is an amazing game. The negatives aren’t really negatives but more personal nitpicks and, in the one case, something that the developers actually knew would engage me even if I didn’t think I’d like it (i.e., the gun towers being used most often at first, which led me to create dozens of gun towers vs. adding other towers as it would always be the first to have enough resources to use). Just a wonderful, wonderful game. I loved playing it the whole way through, including all of the DLC.