Cthulhu tower

Couldn't make it through the tutorial without bugs, making it impossible to play.

Cthulhu Tower looks, sounds, feels, and plays a lot like a Flash game from the mid-2000s, and early gameplay doesn't feel like it has the charm that they needed to compete against their more traditional counterparts.

The lack of control customization combined with the lack of a visible, complete control map add an annoyance factor to the game as well. The main menu shows WASD and left mouse click implying that those are the only controls. The tutorial then introduces I for inventory, B for unknown, and right-clicking to remove objects under specific circumstances.

Because my normal directional control scheme for these sorts of games is FWAE instead of WASD I needed to use AutoHotkey to "remap" the controls at the start of the game and then again later on when it introduced 'I' for your inventory since taking your hand off your movement keys to go in and out of your inventory on a regular basis is *not* a good idea with the early pacing in this game. Of course it turned out that remapping the control keys may be pointless as they have yet to actually affect the game and did not have any apparent effect before I remapped them.

The game's UI is also clunky. The interface windows are overly large thereby blocking a significant portion of your vision while simultaneously *not* pausing gameplay making it difficult to manage buildings when the early gameplay gets hectic. Likewise if you lose a round of gameplay you (at this time apparently) cannot just exit the game; you are instead forced to restart the game/map before the Escape menu will work and let you exit to menu or quit the game or just Alt+F4 to shut the game down manually.

There are a few questionable gameplay aspects as well. For example you can place down floor tiles to increase the area in which you can place your turrets, but the only areas I've been able to place them down in have been to the upper/left, upper/right, and lower/left sections of the starting field. This is problematic because the lower/right edge would let you build up your base in a way where you don't have the tower psychologically if not actually cluttering up your view of your base.

On top of that your towers seem to mostly if not all have the same cooldown/refire rate, and they don't seem to detect and shoot at enemies the way you would expect. Instead of each tower individually shooting at a target as it gets into range it often feels like your towers fire in discrete groups, and it's entirely possible to have situations where so many of your towers are firing in volley that you have waves of projectiles wiping out a bunch of weaker enemies only to let slightly stronger enemies through and almost to your tower before they can fire a second round. Many of those situations came off feeling like they wouldn't have been issues at all if the towers always fired individually. That issue can be both exacerbated and exploited by how opening up the Escape menu doesn't seem to pause your towers' cooldown thereby letting you pause the game to force your towers into volley firing more quickly than they ought to.

There is no stand-alone option to play through the tutorial either. It's a very simple, basic tutorial that doesn't cover upgrading towers or why you would want to stack wall blocks, and you can only do the tutorial by starting a new "main field" game. You get asked if you want to do the tutorial every time you start a "main field" game though.

All that said, the game isn't horrible, and I can see the appeal. I just don't think the game is worth purchasing for the listed $8. That's not a bad price if you can get into the game and play it for 5-10 hours or more. Nothing exists in a vacuum, however, and when you can spend an extra $2 for Defense Grid which has a much better UI, more entertaining gameplay, better controls, and is more fun I don't see paying much more than $2 for Cthulhu Tower.

Edit: I was going to play the game a bit more and try out some of the different modes to be sure I had given it a fair chance, but while loading up a saved "main field" game the program froze up on me less than 25% of the way through the process. I won't be playing any more of this game or updating this review again due to this.

Not a bad game at all but could use some more polish. From what I played I encountered a fair amount of bugs. Sometimes I would place a gun into its slot on the tower and I couldn't shoot afterwards. Another time I lost and tried to press E to restart and it would not respond to any inputs.

I like the art style and design of the game. But when it comes to trying to select where to place or remove your minions on the battlefield there needs to be a higher contrast on what you are selecting. Many times I could not tell who I was selecting and that problem is especially compounded by the main tower obstructing your view behind it. The creature and gun boxes on the battlefield could have just been button inputs in order to decrease clutter around your main area.
I also had difficulty on where to place items I bought for the tower to wear since they all had "head" in their description, yet when I would go to place them in that respective slot I couldn't.

The game could also use some tweaks to the difficulty. Once you find out the strategy for getting past the first day there is no real way to lose. Placing a wall of boxes around the border seems to offer no way for enemies to be able to defeat you, basically rendering you invincible.

I know I essentially laid out a lot of faults in the game but as it is now it is a fun game that could be even better once some of these issues are addressed.

cool looking art style but, on my first play through, I got to day four and then my frames tanked and none of my towers dealt any damage, neither did my weapon. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt and went on the other game modes to unlock the other weapons, got to day 4 easily on the other modes as I had figured out the best strategy. Which was just the red eye and the fiery halo looking thing then only buy the cheapest towers. And after the winter mode the weapon that passes through enemies deals damage for each frame it was in an enemy or something, so even tanks would die in one shot. But every time my game would cark it at day 4 and now I can't get the achieves. Probably going to have to get the old achievement manager out because I can guarantee I would play this game to get those achievements otherwise. As an edit, I have discovered that despite this game having steam achievements, for the purpose of my account's achievement % and perfect games, it has no achievements. Finding this game on my list of games via achievement % shows that there are no achievements. Hopeless.