Hey, #TowerDefense enjoyers, go check out From Ashes, Bloom. You're a shadowy tentacle monster protecting the world tree from loggers. You plant other trees to help.
It doesn't have the depth of #Thronefall (which still looks amazing and keeps getting improvements to add complexity and variety) or story like #Arknights but for a simple free tower defense, it looks like a gem.
Go play it for those of us who can't play games on PC anymore.
I just watched RCE play the coolest looking #TowerDefense game that I've seen in a while. It's called #ToyShire and is made by some Turkish indie devs who just put a free demo on GOG [edit:] and Steam.
Mechanically, it looks pretty similar to a lot of the genre. You have fixed points where you can place and upgrade big beefy towers between waves. During waves, you can deploy units which are slightly mobile but can be damaged by enemies. Solid enough based on the handful of units and towers they've shown off so far but that's not what sells it, the aesthetics are.
You play as Kevin, a boy playing with little green army men. The visuals and environment completely sell that premise. Kevin pulls towers out of his jacket. The paths on the map are made of toys, plates of cookies, furniture, and dirty laundry strewn about the floor. He comments on stuff as it's happening the way a kid playing with his toys might. A jenga tower getting knocked over by his cat can change the path enemies take. And he can make up rules when he has an idea for something cool (the finale of the demo shows it off well).
You get a bit of a feel for who the kid is when you'll see stuff like the BRIO train set being in more built in one stage than when you last saw it. There's a ton of potential for environmental story telling there.
Going back to the visuals, video game graphics have caught up to the point where this is what I imagine the Toy Story 1 tie in game wanted to look like. They are highly detailed models but are unnaturally shiny and the whole thing is bright and colorful.
I don't know if enough Twitch streamers will pick it up for it to get popular since it doesn't look like a great game for that right out of the box but it's absolutely worth checking out.
Here's a short video of daily progress highlights while working on my #bevyjam 4 entry "Go Tower Go" following the theme "well that's a LOT of entities!"
Kingdom Rush Vengeance for #Android is free right now on the Play Store. Hope it goes free on #IOS too, this is basically one of the best #towerdefense series available. Lots of fun and very polished.
Think of the game as Vampire Survivors, but instead of you having to move and all the skills are passively activated, now you just stay in one place, but you must actively use the skills. That makes sense because the game has tower defense theme, as the name suggested. There is another difference though, it’s how players...
I liked #GrizzlyGames previous game #Islanders. Sadly their newest title #Thronefall didn’t click with me at all! Admittedly, I’m not huge on #TowerDefense in general, but the execution here is kinda rough! The compromises it makes to be controller playable, harm the overall experience quite a bit. Commanding your troops is fiddly, and the constant back and forth between the front line and your buildings is annoying. Also, why do destroyed buildings magically rebuild after each wave? 🤔
About the game: a roguelike tower defense where you choose from hundreds of items to craft your unique and powerful builds to defend your only tower against 20 waves of enemies....
Talking about tower defense games the other day led me down a Steam rabbit hole looking for new games to love. I didn't find anything that clicked and wound up looking longingly at Defense Grid 1 & 2 again (they're my all-time favorites).
I realized that while I've spent 100s of hours playing them on Xbox, I never completed them on PC. I have leaderboards to chase and achievements to earn!
I'm really jazzed about this. I wonder how they'll play on Steam Deck?
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
Platform: Steam PC
Release Date: Feb 9, 2018
Library Date: Dec 24, 2019
Unplayed: 1105 days (3y9d)
Playtime: 19m
This game came in a Humble Choice bundle, and it had two things going against it:
Pixel graphics
Platformer
I was there for 8-bit & pixel graphics the first time around. My first "gaming" computer was a PC XT clone with an amber monochrome monitor. Our only gaming was a pong clone.
I think these are the reasons I lack rose-coloured glasses for that era of gaming.
It's a 2D platformer. Like many #autistic folks, my fine motor control is not the greatest, nor is my hand-eye coordination. Platformers have been one of the major sources of frustration for me over the years, as I regularly mashed the wrong keys on the keyboard.
Which turned out to be a part of the problem.
When I got to grips with an Xbox controller to play Forza Horizon 4, it was an eye-opener, not just in terms of racing, but also for platformers.
Aegis Defenders is a 2D platformer mash-up with a Tower Defense game. Explore, find the target, defend it, upgrade, rinse and repeat. It remains to be seen whether I'll want to come back to it repeatedly, so for now I'm giving it a rating of:
Mar 1, 2023 - Day 60 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 66
Game: X-Morph: Defense
Platform: Steam PC
Release Date: Aug 30, 2017
Library Date: Jan 10, 2020
Unplayed: 1146 days (3y1m19d)
Playtime: 28m
Remember when tower defense games were the flavour of the month, and everyone seemed to be making one?
X-Morph: Defense is an isometric, sci-fi, tower defense/top-down shooter mash-up... in which you play the bad guys.
As part of an alien fleet invading Earth, you control a ship that can attack the ground & airborne defenders, while also building towers, and creating blockages to increase the path lengths of the attackers.
There are five waves per level, and in the last wave, you face off against a single boss.
Loading up, I was a bit "Oh, a tower defense game." By the time I finished the level, it was after midnight, and I was "more, please".
Except, I'm on call, and I really do need to go to bed.
Load up X-Morph: Defense and lay the smackdown on those xenophobic humans, because it's:
Apr 15, 2023 - Day 105 - NewPlay Bonus Review
Total NewPlays: 113
Game: Fortified
Platform: Steam PC
Release Date: Feb 4, 2016
Library Date: Jun 7, 2018
Unplayed: 1773d (4y10m8d)
Playtime: 29m
Fortified is 1950's-inspired alien-invasion third-person 3D tower defense game.
It's boring.
I played across two characters, over three levels, and it was just just... boring.
A good tower defense game needs your weaponry and income to scale up appropriately to whatever you're fighting. That balance can be difficult to achieve. Orcs Must Die manages it. Fortified does not.
The "attack" buildings feel incredibly slow and underpowered, and the monsters feel generic and annoying, rather than threatening.
I like to at least reach a checkpoint, or finish a level in a game, and not quit out mid-level, but in all seriousness, I should have, because playing longer to complete the last level didn't make it any more entertaining, which is a fundamental issue. If a game isn't challenging, then it needs to at least be fun.
I can't even offer a hope that there's something under the surface. While 1950's-style the interstitial graphics and interface would feel at home in a pulp sci-fi magazine, the in-game assets feels like generic cut & paste models from a free unreal library.
Could Fortified be more than the sum of it's pulpy parts?:
September 9, 2023 - Day 252 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 273
Game: Rock of Ages 2
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Aug 28, 2017
Library Date: Feb 2, 2019
Unplayed: 1680d (4y7m7d)
Playtime: 15m
Rock of Ages 2: Bigger & Boulder is a bizarre tower defence boulder-racing game.
There's a bunch of games that never made it to being reviewed this year. Many of them were multiplayer games; some of which are still on sale, but invariably had no-one to play against, other than bots or the bizarre individuals who get their kicks from hacking a game and then killing anyone who tries to play.
There's another group of games that didn't make it. Frequently ancient, wouldn't run on Windows 10. Alas, their time has come and gone.
Rock of Ages II is a little weirder. It's just over six years old, but absolutely refused to load.
Load > Crash. Load > Crash. Load > Crash.
[Tech support mode on]
Event viewer is recording the crash, but not making it clear what's at fault.
To the Googles!
One fix says to disable networking.
That... actually works. Not a good solution, but it must be something new in Windows 11 network code, right?
Actually, no.
I went through a stage of this project where I just started all the games for a minute to shorten my "year" list for unplayed games.
When I started ROA2 previously before I upgrades, it had worked fine without crashing.
Digging into the Steam discussions: "Changing this global OpenSSL variable fixes it!"
No, thank you. I don't think I will.
A bit more on the Googles leads to a page on Intel's website, that explains that certain versions of UE4 contain an older OpenSSL library, that triggers a crash on 10th Gen and newer CPUs, and by setting that OpenSSL variable, it tells UE4 to ignore the SHA extensions.
However, it only needs to be set in the launch options for the game, not globally.
We're off to the races.
Literally. This is a game in which you play Sisyphus (I think?) and roll a boulder through an obstacle course towards the castle of your AI opponent (who are various historical figures acting in decidedly non-historical ways).
Inside your castle, workers are quickly carving your boulder from a solid rock. While this is happening, you frantically set up your various defenses to try and knock the AI's boulder off course, while they are doing the same.
As soon as your boulder is ready, you roll it towards their castle, and try to smash down their door. Boulder hits door, does damage, rinse and repeat.
First one with a smashed door loses. All of this is wrapped in a classical music soundtrack with Pythonesque graphical stylings.
I lost, beaten soundly by Joan of Arc (!)
I think, if I were in the right mood, Rock of Ages 2 would be:
December 21, 2023 - Day 354 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 375
Game: Warstone TD
Platform: Steam
Release Date: May 24, 2018
Installation Date: Dec 21, 2023
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 19m
Warstone TD is an isometric tower defense game with some basic RPG, strategy, and city building elements (so says the blurb).
I've started hammering my unredeemed keys list a little bit harder, with the challenge to get it down under 200 before the 1st of January. Just to make the next 10 days a little more gruelling!
Warstone TD was one of them, from Feb 2020; the "TD" is for Tower Defense.
It's a little bit different to most tower defense games I've played, as the game starts with several (I guess they're called) warstones along the path that the mobs follow, and you can choose to build from several optional unit types at each location.
During each round you might unlock an extra warstone to place somewhere else, but I think this is where the element of strategy comes in.
Also, after some rounds, you get a double-strength warstone which increases the range of the units (not sure what else it does).
So far it doesn't seem like you can change or upgrade a unit once activated, so it's an interesting twist on the genre, and I don't have a lot of traditional TD games anyway, so it's kind of fun.
After the initial gameplay introduction, the game sets a story about a wizard who's seen the future, and that he's going to be handed over to a group of invaders by the town, and so he enlists the help of the player (fourth-wall break, nice), to do the city-building thing, and build and arm the city so he doesn't meet that grisly end.
It's a cute framing device and gives some nice RPG elements to push the game outside of the standard tower defense genre.
Warstone TD is kind of fun, and definitely something I'll return to when I'm the mood for that kind of game; it's
New trailer for my personal project. I wish I could quit my job instead of spending nights and weekend days working on it. (www.youtube.com)
Think of the game as Vampire Survivors, but instead of you having to move and all the skills are passively activated, now you just stay in one place, but you must actively use the skills. That makes sense because the game has tower defense theme, as the name suggested. There is another difference though, it’s how players...
OC I've been spending all my weekends making this roguelike tower defense. Now I finally can show you a teaser trailer! Hope you'll like it :) (www.youtube.com)
About the game: a roguelike tower defense where you choose from hundreds of items to craft your unique and powerful builds to defend your only tower against 20 waves of enemies....