Tower Dwellers

Crashes a LOT, and the mouse can be really laggy
Fun little tower defence game otherwise, not much depth.
Worth the 50p I paid in the sale but I wouldn't pay full price for this...

Tower Dwellers is a genuinely but badly made tower defense game that seems to have been designed for mobile app stores but was released on Steam by mistake. This will cause great embarrassment at the next finance meeting when they ask about what the mobile revenue for the game was. Regardless this is basically a ripoff of Kingdom Rush, but trying to be even more jokey (one of your attacks is to throw chickens at the enemies). Like Kingdom Rush, you have "soldier" towers that produce troops that stand on the pathway. However there's also buildings you can build adjacent to the soldier towers (instead of more towers) that equip/enhance the troops. Clever idea, but it's not enough to save the otherwise dismal game (and it some ways that's a shame, this could have been so much better than it turned out to be).

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

From my experience with the game, it's somewhat bug riddled and has design/implementation/stability problems that will render this unplayable for many gamers. The game is unpolished and badly optimised, with sluggishness, freezes, crashes to desktop and a bunch of other issues and problems.

There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.

The game features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Cocos Creator/Cocos2D game engine/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it's free (so they don't have to pay for GameMaker Studio) and doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's arguably worse than GameMaker Studio). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine.

This is indistinguishable from a mobile app, but they put this on Steam instead of the app stores by mistake. Was it rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all)?.

Regardless, for all intents and purposes Tower Dwellers might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

Tower Dwellers didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for unlocking the first unit, trivial to get, but less than 36 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Tower Dwellers is relatively cheap at $3 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Simply not a good game. The approach is really good, the maps, towers and heroes are really good. However, the game still struggles with performance problems and the difficulty of the 5-star levels is in no way commensurate with the potential of the towers.

so unknown, so good

I thought it was fun. It did seem a bit rough, as if it were a bit amatuerish, but still a fun little game. Some of the levels are frustrating and you have to be careful where you place your units. You actually have to pick the spot where they are stangind and if you are a bit too far away from one path or another they won't be in range.

Ah, I've edited this review at least 11 times but what you need to know is:

* Many people has horrible horrible performance issues with this game. I have tried on two different systems (i3+radeon 8gb ram, i5+geforce 16gb ram) and have tried swapping old hd with ssd-drive on both systems. And the game goes from unplayable to playabale on both systems.

But even with SSD, the game STILL has strange freezes (in menues and when selecting units).

Other than that (and another handful of minor issues) the game isn't bad. I (again) change this to recommend, but the game is really threading a needle to get there.

Some people say they don't have any performance issues with this game but I honestly have difficult to believe that - maybe they are talking about the mobile version. Without a SSD you are likely looking at the worst performnce issue in a game on steam.

It says a lot about the dev(s) who has done nothing to address the performance issues.

But by all means try it out - if you can get through the menus without problems the game is probably playable for you. If not you should refund the crap out of it.

Due to performance issues I will not recommand this game.

It looks great and I like the way one can combine different powers to one tower, I even like the story but because of the performance I get frustrated quickly and just don't want to continue.
If you don't mind that try it!

Performance is awful. Game hangs and takes a long time to load. Too tedious to navigate compared to other TD games.

The game looks great, but plagued by performance problems.

The art is great and the maps have lots of fun details. I find upgrade mechanic interesting from what I've seen so far.

The performance problems are constant and incredibly frustrating. They seem related to the UI, but not completely. Any action that opens a window often takes a second+. It's so unresponsive that you start wondering if you didn't actually clicked the right spot. This happens even when you're out of combat such as between maps and you want to look at different upgrade options. If I click on my hero, the FPS goes from 60 to 27 and the game often freezes for a second+. If I let the battle run without touching my keyboard or mouse, there will still be significant FPS drops. Keep in mind there are not many units on the screen, maybe 30 total.

As for gameplay you can construct towers or support buildings and there are seperate build locations for each. The tower size determines the number of units and their strength. A level one tower has one unit. If that unit dies, it will eventually regenerate. The support structures determine the type of units. This allows you to balance between melee, range and magic attacks. From what I've seen the towers never fire or attack on their own. It's all about the units that they create. It's almost like your only towers are barracks or guard house type towers from other tower defense games. Maybe this changes at some point, but that's all I've seen so far.

You also have three powers: area attack, unit heal and slow. You get them starting with the first map. They seem to regenerate quickly.

Each completed map opens up three upgrades which you can spend stars on. You earn stars by completing maps. Three initally then a couple more from increasing the difficulty. This is a maximum of five per map and the upgrade costs were 3, 3 and 4 stars so it might not be possibly to have all the upgrades. Again I haven't played very far so maybe this changes later in the game. None of the upgrades I saw really stood out and I took the 'archers do more damage'. I hope this changes, but none of the 18 or some upgrades I've open looked fun.

You also have a hero and apparently can open up more heroes at some point. The first thing you learn in that your hero is stupid. You will tell him to stand in front of the archers and 10 seconds later he's a third of the map away leaving your archers exposed. I've never seen him return on his own. The heroes don't appear to have any player controlled abilities nor advancement potential. The units themselves are also stlightly stupid. Enemy archers will slowly pick off each melee unit from a distance and the unit will just stand there until dead. You have to send in your hero to take out the archers or maybe micromange the unit locations.

The game has been out for several month and I don't see any patches. My game says it's 1.0. There are a couple old developers posts in the spartan forums. It doesn't like any of the issues will ever be improved.

Good:

• Art style
  
• Attention to art detail
  

• Tower mechanics
  
• Upgrades
  
• Heroes
  

• Performance
  
• Depth
  
[*]Lack of developer support

Strong Pass

Well worth the price...

Another one of those great fun mobile games come to PC.

The only thing that I do not like is that all the heroes are unlocked and selectable right from the start.

They should have like in other games of this type slowly had you unlocked the heroes as you progressed through the campaign.

Another thing that I do not like is that the game does not have a way to level up the hero as they gain experience.

But other than those two small things I'm happy with this purchase.

I will compare it to the game it is based on Kingdom rush. The hero is boring without skills or levels, the enemys have no diversity, it feels that every map is basically the same. I was hoping for something different and better than kingdom rush frontiers, but everything is worst on my opinion.

I also have a bug that i am unable to move the hero.

Obviously 'inspired' by the Kingdom Rush series, but very well produced. I enjoyed playing it, and would recommend it to those who like Tower Defense games.

Pros:
Nice animations and art style, voice acting and quirky humor.
Contains fresh elements in the tower defense genre, even though it is similar in appearance to Kingdom Rush.

Cons:
Some bugs here and there (textual, or support buildings connecting to the wrong towers).
Some of the upgrades you can purchase have very little use.

Tower Dweller, is surprisingly enough a tower defense game. The graphics are cute and clean and works really well with the games feel. You start of we a really funny story of why you have to defend your land, the voice acting is phenomenal and it actually made me laugh! (That does not happen often)

The game progression is good, you start off with being able to build the basic towers who spawns peasants with hay forks. Your towers can have supporting buildings next to them, that upgrades your peasants to militia solders with swords. From each tower, you are able to set a flag down on the path, and that towers units, will move to that location, this way you can create different lines of defenses along the path to make your units perform the best and support each other....

My full review right here:

http://rawdeegaming.com/tower-dwellers-rawview/

Looks and feels very similar to Kingdom Rush, but with slightly different game mechanics, which is exactly what you want out of a tower defense game if you're a KR fan. It's got less features and flavor overall when compared to KR though.. No hero levels or skill trees, less diverse tower types, and no interactibles in the environment as far as I can tell. I don't think there are any units that slow / charm / paralyze enemies, push enemies back up the path, insta-kill or anything like that. Just regular projectile/melee attacks all around, making the strategy a bit bland.

The towers don't necessarily target the furthest advanced enemy, which can be a bit frustrating since flying enemies sometimes just sail by while the archers are busy shooting ground enemies that are much closer to the beginning of the path. There are no options to change the targetting AI either. Instead, you can click on a single enemy at a time to make everyone within range focus on it.

Overall happy about having bought this game. Haven't experienced any performance issues or serious bugs like that other guy.

Remarkably buggy. Cute game but unplayable due to performance issues.