While providing some potentially good ideas, the product packaged by the guys at SuperVillain Studios is not able to convince due to a sometimes embarrassing lack of content. Single-player is almost non-existent and in online matches is often hard to find a worthy opponent . Plus, there are only three maps to play in, too few if you think that the level design is an integral part of gameplay.
Tower Wars is a tower defense game combined with army building. This indie title was released in August 2012, so has been around for a while coming in with about 400k owners on Steam.
As with other tower defense games, you start out with a blank battlefield, although this version of tower defense is slightly different to others, you are also fighting against an opponent, who is also building towers on their blank battlefield. The aim of the game is to get your army into the enemies base to destroy their castle before they destroy yours. Tower Wars has two currency systems, Gold and Battle points - you are able to generate gold via the mines which are already located on your map; you can do the usual technique with tower defense games and upgrade them so that they generate more gold and are quicker at it. Battle points come through sending units to your opponent and working their way to the castle, this of course requires gold though.
You build units from your barracks with gold, there is a build queue which you can fill up however you please with different assorted units which you can train, and then push them all out in one go. Your barracks has a cool down so you can only push one wave out every 40 seconds or so. Some units are basic, some have their own special abilities, and some even increase the stats of the whole wave, regardless of whether they are near the units or not.
The tower building side of things is again, very similar to other tower defense games, you are able to position your towers pretty much anywhere you want on the map, allowing you to create all sorts of death traps, and corridors that your foe has to battle through, obviously the more ground the opponent has to cover, the more damage you can do to them with your turrets. There are plenty of the normal sort of turrets, such as cannons and arrow launchers, but there are also some really unique ones, such as a huge fan that pushes your opponents back in a certain direction, this makes for some great end of hallway traps! All of the turrets are able to be upgraded in the usual fashion too, however I didn't really find the need to do that in the single player mode.
Tower Wars has a really nice looking graphic and art style; they are really polished and it looks like a lot of care and attention has gone into making this a beautiful steam-punk looking game.
The difficulty in Tower Wars takes a huge ramp up once you get past the tutorial. I will say though, the game's tutorial is really helpful and gets you to grips with the UI and all of the basic elements of the game. It does leave out a few bits that mean you have to go digging around and use a bit of trial and error to see what is what, but that's part of the fun of this type of game. There are also an abundance of guides, and wiki posts out there if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it.
Since the game is almost four years old now, the multiplayer scene seems to have died down a bit, at the time of writing this there are only ~30 people playing the game, but thankfully the game does have the option for co-op, so that may peek the attention of some people
Technically, this game has a lot of graphical options, allowing you to cater it for your rigs power and capability, coming with plenty of resolution options too.
I have put about six hours into Tower Wars so far, and given that matches against the UI/Bots can sometimes last anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour, you can expect to get a lot of gameplay out of this even on the single player mode. If you manage to find **** of friends to play this with, you are looking at a major time sink with ample amounts of fun and content. I will definitely be carrying on playing Tower Wars after writing this review, since it also has that addicted sort of gameplay that I just cannot put down.
Thankfully, due to the price of Tower Wars being £5,59, I am going to strongly recommend this title, if it was any more I would have just said to pick it up when on sale due to the lack of multiplayer activity, but because it is already a low price as it stands, I can easily say you will get at least five or six hours of enjoyment out of it. Hardcore tower defense fans should not miss out on this game!
I honestly feel that this game deserves an 8. But i see to many needless negative reviews, (I.E. This deserves a 0 because the multiplayer isn't properly working). Which is why i'm over-scoring it. I don't really give a **** about the multiplayer, yet i hear there are still bugs in the singleplayer, none of which I've encountered so i can't tell you about them. I love tower defense and this game is beautiful and really cheap, so i definitely recommend. If you do happen to find a game breaking bug, then oh well, your out a whole 7$, not really a big deal.
Tower Wars feels as if it were designed specifically for hardcore strategists. With a tutorial that skips important concepts and the tendency for matches to become one sided, the result is an uncomfortable and frustrating experience for beginners.
Tower Wars is completely functional and full of spirit; however, lack of a single-player mode and unruly queue times will likely leave many gamers unfulfilled.
I cant understand how this brilliant piece of strategy, the tower defense that changed the genre forever, can have such bad reviews. You don't have to be genius to understand the logic. But maybe I expect too much from average players.
I say this is the best tower defense game I ever played. Better than fiedrunners, an much better than any other classical title.
Most negative or mixed reports that I read here are outdated. The single player was buffed a lot, but don't be fooled. This thing is about playing man vs man, brain vs brain. And there is plenty of active players around.
I had a lot of fun with this one. Figuring out how the different mechanics in the game was neat, and the game mechanics themselves are very interesting. There are some interesting choices to be had here. And, there's a lot going on in every match.
Still, there are a lot of small issues that add up to the game not realizing its full potential.
The game really throws you in the deep end when you start out. I lost for four hours straight against the easiest AI while I learned to play, and I've played a whole lot of tower defense games before. So it's not very friendly to new players.
As you get more experienced in the game, however, it's not your skill that starts to hold you back, it's the interface. Moving units around in the queue is awkward, and the queue itself is very unresponsive. To load up a Trojan horse, I typically have to click on the horse icon 4 or 5 times to get it to respond. This is inexcusable in a competitive game.
I absolutely love the tower wars mechanics, and it's a lot of fun to play. But ultimately, there are too many flaws for this to be a good game.
Not a typical TD game in that the game play is mostly focused on player versus player instead of player vs AI. You create a wave of attackers while trying to fend off enemy waves using your own towers. There is a limited single player mode where you play against an AI that sends endless waves of progressively harder enemies. This mode is more of a time-attack as you can never "win".
Games take a long time to play out, even when you are losing badly. When you start to lose, the enemy waves get a little closer each time. It is a painfully slow way to go. My first game had me losing pretty badly because I had no idea what I was doing. Even so, it would have taken another 10 minutes for the other player to finish me off.
Rather than wait for my inevitable defeat, I left the game (there is no surrender option). For that, I got a rage quit achievement ... so thanks for that.
If there was a single player or co-op campaign mode, I would have given a higher score. TD versus players kind of feels like a really simplified RTS. If you've always wanted to play TD with a friends, this is for you. If you like classic TD, skip it.
as the name states, its a tower defense game.
got it from a bundle so i was curious how it is.
well the graphics are sweet, thats the good part.
there are only 3 different maps, and they arent so large either so it gets boring after a short amount of time.
the controls are weird and annoying if youre trying to build fast.
the tutorial for noobs only explains the basics, multiplayer seems to be dead already.
when youre lucky to find a match, you either play vs a complete autist or a 578347593845 skill guy whos playing day&night. pretty bad matchmaking.
maybe its fun in coop, but all together its far away from being as good as warcraft 3 tower defense mods that i loved to play.
7€ are not much, but because of the few maps and dead multiplayer, even this seems to be overpriced.
SummaryHello there, good sir! Or is it madam, perhaps? Well, thats neither here, nor there! Matters of far greater importance are at hand! It would appear that, through the peculiar optical contraption that youre staring into, you have managed to find yourself here! Where is here, you ask? Why, in the midst of Tower Wars, of course! I must say,...