Prime World: Defenders

just a great tower defense game. very straight forward and cut and dry. the way it should be

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At times frustrating and needlessly esoteric, this is nevertheless a solid Tower Defense game with a card-collecting mechanic that tends to be a bit too random to be 100% useful. Depending on your luck with drops, you may have to spend extra time grinding some levels to advance. HUGE hint: Lightning is OP - but is also one of the most expensive towers in the game.

It is a cellphone game converted to PC, it has that tedious grinding to get cards and in game currency. Its all free now, but the grind, the grind is boring.

I woud recommend it just because it is a TD and i like those games, but it does not have nothing special on it. All the lore is not interesting and cliche, it has a poor interface and theres not enought explanation about the towers and how they work porperly.

Very Grindy, and trying to level up different towers is part of the draw. If you don't like grind, avoid.

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My Tower Defense Tier List
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S Tier: X-Morph Defense | Warcraft 3 (Custom Maps) | Orcs Must Die! 2 | Orcs Must Die! 3 |

A Tier: Fieldrunners 2 | Dungeon Warfare | Warstone TD | Orcs Must Die! | Revenge of the Titans | Plants Vs Zombies |

B Tier: Unstoppable Gorg | Prime World Defenders | Dungeon of the Endless | Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal |

C Tier (Enjoyed playing): Dungeon Warfare 2 | Kingdom Rush | Refactor | Digfender | Defenders Quest: Valley of the Forgotten | Starship Defense |

D Tier: Fieldrunners | Infinitode | Element TD 2 | Space Run | Bloons TD 5 | Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows | Deathtrap | Terrorhedron | Dungeon Defenders | Dwarfs!? (Tower Defense Mode) | Ancient Planet |

E Tier: Sang-Froid: Tales of Werewolves | Sentinel 3: Homeworld | Unholy Heights | Rock of Ages 3 | Infested Planet | Cubetractor | Defense Grid: The Awakening | Sanctum 2 | Super Sanctum TD | Steamworld Tower Defense |
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What would you get if you had a nice TD concept, but wanted your players to commit as many microtransactions as possible?
Prime Defenders! :D
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This game is bad just for one small reason and I'll try to describe it shortly:
So, you, as a dev create a F2P tower defense game, which all of your mobile gamers tend to like.
And then you get an idea to port it for PC /(console?) and sell as a full price game.
Sounds good, doesn't work. Why?
Because donations/microtransactions and paywalls are the core of this type of games, and while it feels somewhat satisfying and nice in a mobile game, when you achieve something by mindless grinding (while taking a subway or sinking your time any other way) turns into complete garbage when it comes to desktop gaming.
This game uses Silver as currency. You need silver to Buy cards, Upgrade cards, Level up and some other stuff. And you need a lot.
How would one earn it? Repeat same maps with same enemies and your weak towers over and over and over again. No tactics, no randomization - just pure grinding. You got that 1k silver needed for level-up? Cool! Now grind another 500 to upgrade one of your towers. And then another one. And another one.
Want to progress? Well, you can't your towers are too weak and you surely need those levelups. :D
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This game could easily be saved if the devs made a proper balance re-calculation for desktop version. But no, it's just a port of a mobile game without the possibility to donate. You'd better stay away and play Kingdom Rush or Wizard games. Cheers!

This tower defence game is fun in parts but i cannot recommend it.

More advanced towers should come to you as you naturally progress through the game and not by some random card drop.
If you don't have the right cards for the level it becomes increasingly difficult to proceed as the enemies level with you through out the game. You will then have to farm the right card drops for the job, its a mechanic of the game that adds unnecessary grinding, unless you are really lucky and get the right cards for each and every level first time.

This game is fantastic! The best part is waiting to get the right cards. But also the very near wins, the surprise when you finally clear a board that was previously impossible, the slow progression building up tower capabilities.

!!! I can't believe I waited for this to go on sale! !!!

All the negative reviews are completely wrong. Yes you might get very lucky with a bad RNG - but that might also be a problem with not trying various towers that solve certain problems. At least from playing the game for 5 hours (nonstop immediately after buying it) I've seen some great gameplay. It took quite a while to hook me - it had to grow on me. Now I have to pull myself away from it because it's a work night!

Great job to the devs, and yes I recommend this. Unless you want to get any real life work done... in which case... run away run away run away!!!

A good TD game which suffer from bad porting and an intense grind.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1433712683
I liked the game at the beginning. There is a nice story with cool comics. The graphics is cozy. The game teaches you step by step and offers new mechanics each level. There is a lot of towers and extra content, but.. there is a grind. Intense grind.

After 5th mission, you unlock side missions. It is the same mission which you have already pass. You can farm game currencies there. The game even tells you. You can't pass the next mission. You are too weak. Go and play side missions better. It's not cool. I passed boss level after several attempts using strategy. But after 2-3 story missions I got stuck.

There is a mission there you hold 19 waves with no problems and 20th wave destroys you with no chance to survive. I tried to pass this mission at least 9 times. I even tried to farm coins. But, the game gives you just a few coins per each completion. Also mechanics of getting towers is so random. I gave up.

If you need to do boring stuff to play interesting stuff, then the game is poorly designed. It's pity, because the game could be great.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1433712778
Pros
- Good cozy graphics
- A lot of towers. The game offers a lot of different possibilities to pass each level|
- There is a story with well drawn comics
- A lot of extra content. You can learn player skill. You can combine cards to unlock next levels of towers. You can power up towers to give them permanent bonuses and etc.

Cons
- The game was originally made as free-to-play mobile game. Devs cut ability to buy coins and replace it with intense grind. Everything requires coins. You get just a few coins after each story mission. You need to grind the rest again and again by playing same levels.
- There is a lot of towers. But you can take only 4-6 to battle. Also, if you didn't take a special tower ( and you don't know which is), you will lose. Fore example, if you didn't take anti-air to a mission with air enemies, you will lose. If you didn't take block tower to a maze level, you will lose. What is the purpose to add so much towers in the game and allow to bring only a few of them.
- You get of buildfileds very often. You can upgrade towers, but to unlock a possibility of upgrade, you need to find 2-3 cards to combine them in the forge. You need to spend coins to buy card packs with a random chance to get certain card. And spend 500 coins to combine them. Everything of it requires intense grind.
- Balance issues. I had a lot of time the next situation. The first 19 waves are simple and 20 wave breaks your defense in a second. There is no difficulty settings, so if you cant pass it, you have a only way to grind.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1433712742

Resume

Microtransactions, bugs that have been in the game for well over 4 years, bugged achievements, crashes to desktops.

DO NOT BUY

This game is a testament to what can be both good, and unbelievably bad in gaming.

I -LOVE- tower defense games, to the point of friends making fun of me for playing anything in the genre now matter how bad it looks. I picked this one up on a whim and right off the bat I could tell this game was set up with a mobile market in mind.

They build RNG into your potential power by making upgrades random drops, and build the maps around having gotten said random upgrades. So inevitably, you will reach a spot where the towers you have are simply not good enough, and to proceed you will have to grind and spend time PRAYING for a specific tower that you want to drop so you can upgrade it.

It is a black spot in the genre, and this game should be avoided on that basis alone. The rest of the game is bog standard tower defense, and not interesting enough to make this system worth my time. Do not purchase.

Unfortunatly I can't recommend this game any longer. The developers tied many game features to an online server, which they have since shut down, making all of these "always online" features broken leaving a shell of a game behind. Many of these features, like game progress and achievements, have no need of online functionality yet their gone anyways.

In addition, the developers abandoned this version of the game early on, instead deciding to only update a F2P version littered with microtransactions avalible elsewhere.

It started out as a fun little tower defense game, but the actions of the developers show they're not very consumer friendly, and you can not count on their games working for long. I'll be avoiding any games by Nival in the future.

Lost 38hrs of gameplay because the servers don't exist anymore. Can't even recover it and play in offline mode. Have to start again from the beginning and grid all that effort again... er no thanks.

Game was good and fun once. Now the Servers are offline which results in Achievements and progress not being saved as well as major lag as a result of the game trying to reconnect to the servers.

Developer (Nival) stopped supporting the game months ago. Servers with achievements / progress data are offline.

WARNING
It is currently impossible to earn steam achievements in this game, as the devs have appeared to take the servers offline (been that way for a few weeks now). Also, the store daily specials do not update, and there is no daily login reward.

I will update this review should the developers change this, but as of this moment, that is a gamebreaking bug for me, and I'd never be willing to put my word behind a broken game.

Please mark as helpful so that others can see before buying.

I'm still playing the game, but it features a pretty manipulative game device to make you grind the same levels over and over. Like all card games, getting powerful cards is low probability. But this game makes it worse by requiring you to get 3 copies of rare towers to evolve them to red to get past the later story missions. Only by grinding extra "optional" hard missions endlessly can you do this, which is pretty tedious and it's very frustrating (another manipulative device to keep you playing). If you prefer new content and meaningful puzzles to solve, don't get this game.

If you are into this type of games - tower defence - this is the one you definitely wanna try.

Prime World: Defenders makes you think how you could beat AI better, quicker and cheaper. Every tower has its price and costs an amount of "prime", which you are lack of and it makes levels hard as hell so this is the reason why you need better towers which you can achiev by buying new cards and playing almost same levels again and again which sometimes makes this game really boring. You can improve your cards by evolving and fusing them. It's the biggest minus that I see in this game, it takes really long to have powerful and useful defence against all types of monsters so if you are not patient this isn't game for you.

Not very impressed by this game but neither disappointed.
6/10

Update: Server no longer available.

The game is a good bang for your buck. If you enjoy TD, and need a good 10 minutes of free time, this is the one to pick up. There are skill points, evolving towers, and an enjoyable card system. There is currency which allows you to buy random chance drawings at different tiers. The graphics are very good considering the price. The towers are not very balanced, but the tiered system allows basically three levels of rarity. The metascore is not a fair score. While there is some grind, that is kinda the point of TD games. You grind for better towers and skills. You can still progress far without having to grind as much, but you need to get at least 1 or 2 "pink" cards (tier 3) to really shine in grinding/progress.

I have about 50 hours in the iPad version as well which seems to be better in terms of log-in rewards but worse in terms of glitches/freezes.

Pretty interesting and refreshing concept of merging TD and CTG into one game. BUT, since the developer/publisher is Nival, the game just HAD to have truckloads of grinding experience. And, of course, a pinch of bugs as well.

I will recommend it, because it is innovative after all and fairly cheap (frequent on 75% off sales, been in couple of bundles so far), but when you get stuck at playing the same mazes over and over again in order to collect more cards, coins or stars, don`t say I didn`t warn you. Perfect game for the sadistic types, if your mistress haven`t punished you enough on your last session - play this game to fulfill your fantasies.

I am slightly conflicted in recommending this. On one hand, purely from a "tower defense" perspective, the gameplay is pretty solid. Everything works as it should and it is well-designed (nice interface, towers all serve specific purposes, enemy health, waves and routes are clearly indicated, etc). And most importantly, the actual gameplay itself is fun. What brings this down are the nonstandard elements the developers tried to introduce into the standard tower defense formula - specifically, the "card system" (and everything that comes along with it). There's nothing wrong with the basic idea - tower types are represented by cards that can be collected and leveled up, and you have to pick and choose a subset of cards from your deck before going into a level. Where the problem comes in is obtaining the cards you need you be successful and "leveling up" those cards. First of all, the leveling system is overly confusing and needlessly complicated. Secondly, in order to beat the later levels, you will need specific cards leveled up to adequate levels of strength. The problem with this is that most of the cards you get as rewards are random, so you could go a good long while without (or possibly even never) finding a Lightning Tower card, for example (which I would consider absolutely essential for beating the game). And even if you are lucky enough to get some good towers, the process of leveling them up takes serious time. You basically just need to keep grinding out optional levels to get extra cards that can be used to fuse/evolve other cards. And make no mistake, you are going to be doing some serious grinding. So, depending on your tolerance for grinding levels and ranking up things, that's how I would recommend you make your decision to buy this or not. Personally, I am the OCD-type who feels the need to level things up and complete stuff, so I forced myself through and eventually got enough cards of high enough strength to power through the main game, as well as the extra hard difficultly that unlocks afterwards. While I did enjoy the game overall, it did take a lot of time and effort to get the most out of it. To me, tower defense shouldn't be about making towers strong enough to win by brute force. It should be about overcoming the challenges using a set of predefined towers and nothing else except whatever strategy you come up with. The first half of this game can be played along those lines, but once you get to the later levels, you will absolutely hit a wall if you don't have certain cards leveled up to a certain strength. That's poor design in my eyes. But even with all that said, I honestly still had fun with this game, as it's well made and I have a semi-high tolerance for grindy things. If you think you can deal with the grinding issue and like TD games, definitely go for it. Otherwise, you may want to hold off or wait for a huge discount.

Metascore 58?! Are you kidding me? I just don't get it. My only complaint with this game is that it's too grindy at certain points, and with not so many maps it can make the experience somewhat repetitive. Aside from that, the upgradeable trading cards meets tower defense idea here works surprisingly well, and above all it's fun. If you're a fan of tower defense, I say go for it. It's one of the best in the genre (up there with defense grid, plants vs. zombies, etc.). 8/10

Update: Offline mode has been implemented.

Prime World: Defenders is a challenging tower defense with card collecting and rpg elements, where the story is told through comic book art sequences with full voice acting. 23 repeatable story levels, as well as randomized levels for grinding, are laid out on an overworld map. When you play a level you’ll have a rotatable, zoomable and pannable isometric view of towers and enemies. Towers cost “prime” to build and upgrade, and you only begin levels with a small amount. Killing enemies will earn you more prime, as will summoning additional waves of enemies before they’re due--though in many cases this will increase the difficulty and possibly overwhelm you. Where towers can be placed on the field there are sometimes helpful anomalies which increase their range, power or firing rate. There is also a handy toggle for 2x battle speed.

Towers and spells in the game are represented by reusable cards in your inventory, and you can only carry a set number with you into battle. You can see which enemy types populate a map before you enter so you know how to build your deck. There are towers for both land and air enemies, invisibility detection, snaring, poison, fire, mortar and more. Destructible towers which buff or heal the enemy may also exist within levels.

Spells don’t cost prime but are instead on a timer, and consist of targetable AoEs which snare, stun, reveal invisible enemies and/or do flat damage. Spell and tower cards can be combined with other cards in the forge to level them up--increasing their base damage, range and/or secondary effect intensity--and tower cards can be combined with their duplicates to make the towers upgradeable to tier II and tier III during battle, doubling and quadrupling their damage respectively.

Currency is awarded after battle and can be used to unlock talents for your hero, purchase cards from the store and pay for forging costs. Each story map you complete will earn you 1-3 stars as well, depending on your performance. These stars can be used to unlock high level talents and purchase rare cards. You’ll also be numerically scored on every story map depending on how much damage you take and the amount of prime you have left over at the end, and these scores can be compared with friends’ for each map. You’re also given a total game score which can be compared both globally and with friends’ on the leaderboards.

The difficulty can be frustrating and requires some grinding before bosses, but it tends to be a gear check rather than a matter of skill. Everything about Prime World: Defenders is surprisingly solid for a title that came out of nowhere, and that’s even considering my time with the game was mostly in its beta state and the fact I am not remotely a fan of tower defense.