At first I was rather enjoying this, it seemed like a relatively simple but fairly well-crafted tower defence game, and as the upgrades gradually opened up, they sounded quite interesting. As I progressed through the early levels, I found the game to be extremely forgiving, and I was never anywhere close to losing, but was nonetheless enjoying the experience.

However, after the “Rakthor” boss, the sense of flexibility or freedom to try different strategies is regularly undermined, sometimes seeming to disappear entirely. It was already a weakness of the game that tower placement locations are highly limited, but after that initial batch of levels, it frequently feels more broadly limited in terms of what you must do to succeed. For many levels, you just have to identify which types of towers the game requires you to place in which locations, and experiment a little to work out the sequence in which they need to be placed and upgraded; follow the steps correctly and you basically can’t lose, do anything else and you basically can’t win…

Even after just a handful of levels that felt like this, the game started to lose any sense of dynamism for me – and you encounter them more and more frequently as you progress. It feels less like you’re tactically defending your base, and rather that you’re just cracking a rather uncompelling puzzle to identify the correct steps, then going through the motions.

TLDR: I enjoyed the first 3 hours or so, and still had some degree of fun afterwards, but when you grate against how restrictive the levels can be it starts to feel very flat, and so ultimately it was a distinct disappointment.