The Best Defense

King of Posters
1

Let’s talk about Tower Defense games.

I’ve been playing Dungeon Warfare on my phone and that’s a really good game. It’s not incredibly complicated, but the main hook is that there are “runes” that can up the difficulty of a stage in various ways, which then gives you more XP. The XP is also your score, so it makes it into a high score game where you try and balance your risk vs. the reward. The levels are also fairly complicated and allow for you to place barriers to redirect enemies. It’s all pretty basic, but something about it is very compelling.

My favorite TD game is GemCraft. It’s got a lot of complexity buried under some pretty ugly graphics. Your only weapons are gems of different colors, which you can combine to level up and place in towers. You can also drop them as bombs to do immediate damage. Each gem color has a different property - if you combine them with other gem colors, their damage goes up and the special effects get combined, but the effects themselves are weaker. The creation of gems is randomized, so you’re never 100% sure which color you’re going to get when you create one.

It’s not a very hard game, but the game strongly encourages you to send multiple waves of enemies at once to get a much much higher score. That’s where the game really shines, as you have to strike a fine balance between sending more enemies and actually being able to defeat them. The optimal strategy is to send enough waves all at once that you can barely kill the last enemy before it reaches your tower. It gets rid of the typical tower defense problem where you spend most of the game waiting for creatures to die or to gain gold.

I’m curious if anyone has a strong historical knowledge of TD games. My personal history is this: My first encounter with them was with Starcraft custom maps, where up to 8 players would cooperate to defend a central point from waves of enemies. Typically there were no units available to the players, only defensive structures. I think that this was the origin of TD, as I had never seen it before this point.

After SC I started seeing flash TD games, then TD maps in Warcraft 3. If I remember correctly, this split off into maps where instead of building towers, you would defend lanes using towers and heroes. Eventually this became a competitive game of 4v4 rather than a cooperative one, and spawned DOTA and, eventually, the total mess that is the MOBA scene.

This is of course mostly based on my experiences - I have no sources to back this up.

So, what are your favorite TD games?

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I don’t have much experience with TD myself and I definitely don’t know much about the history of them. I kinda liked that Sanctum game for a bit, but that is about it. The genre never really pulled me into experimenting with it. My loss perhaps.

3

My first exposure to this sort of thing was also Starcraft custom maps. (“Turret Defense,” “Evolves,” and “Defend the Temple” were probably my favorites.) Actually, if Rampart counts, I used to play that a lot in the arcade. I’ve tried a fair number of tower defense games since then, and I didn’t care for most of them. These are my favorites:

Defense Grid: The Awakening

Polished and varied, this would be my most-played Steam game if not for Terraria according to the stats on my profile. As much as I like this game, the sequel just didn't grab me in the same way. Not even to the extent that the first game's expansions did. Maybe it was great as well and I'd just had enough at that point; I'm not sure. (Steam link)

Immortal Defense

I'm acquainted with this game's creator and the writer is someone I am familiar with from my ZZT days, but I don't think I'm biased toward the game because of that. I like both the story and the mechanics, and I can never decide whether this or Defense Grid is my favorite tower defense game. (Steam link)

Plants vs. Zombies

If you can look past the cash-in on the tiresome popularity of zombies, this is an enjoyable game. It could have more depth, maybe, but I found it compelling to the end. Works well on a tablet, too. (Steam link)

Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal

I think I got this for less than 1 USD in a Steam sale, and I ended up liking it a lot. Like Immortal Defense, it attempts to tell a story that's more than just a throwaway theme. It's much a real-time strategy game as a tower defense game, and it also differs from other such games in that the enemy is a fluid. (Steam link)

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord

A decent Wiiware game in which you create floors in a tower to defeat heroes who are attempting to climb it. I don't think I ever finished the game, but I don't remember whether that was because I lost interest or whether it became too difficult for me. I'm thinking it was the latter.
4

Oh gosh how could I forget this game! It’s probably one of my most played co-op games, surprisingly. It’s not super deep but it’s very charming, and I love that they just eliminated the idea of a maze-like map and turned it into 5 lanes. It lets the enemies and “towers” be much larger and therefore much more charming. I like to play this with my wife about once every couple of years. It crams a lot of possible strategies into a simplified structure, and I like it for that.

Immortal Defense, I played the demo of that and I didn’t care for it! But it seemed pretty neat anyway. I remember watching it being developed on the TIGSource forums a lonnng time ago.