Steampunk Syndicate

so what that it is a mobile port

nice little tower defense game with huge number of levels

well worth picking up

if you have any display problems try using borderless gaming software available on steam

Too easy

This is different to many other TD games and I liked it. With that said the sounds and music need to be turned down or off. Good time waster. I like things that die noisily so this was good for me.

It´s a new setting for a tower defense game and the graphics are nice and cartoonish. The basic gameplay is as it is in every TD-game. You can upgrade your towers (tesla, flamethower, machine gun, bombs) in battle and you even have a mech which is your base but it can defend itself as well. You also control your heroes or special troops and all can be upgraded outside the battle.
For winning a level you get a reward - cards and jewels. The jewels can be used either to buy new cards or to bring your heroes back to life in a battle. Two cards of the same kind can be merged together to one card of a higher level. By doing so, you increase your strength, be it heroes, towers or mech. The mech you can also equip in the hangar with weapons of your choice.
So in the end the only thing of a card building game is the cards as a way of improving everything, but not being a card game itself.
There are a lot of levels, where you can try to get the maximum of three stars, they are fun to play, some are more challenging than others and using your upgraded guns, you can replay them to earn the whole stars. There is even a small story with a few cut-scenes which is nice to have and not too long, to slow down the game. As a bonus, you can play the survival mode, to earn jewels and cards if you´re too weak to play on or if you have already finished the game and want to get everything to the max.

I really can recomend this game for those who like the genre, like the setting and casual games. Even the normal price is great for what you get. I cannot remember any bugs or waiting more than one second for the cards to merge.

Cool little tower defense game :3

This game defines 2 out of 5 stars.

This is a poor execution of the standard Tower Defense formula.

This game features:
A customizable tank, with several slots to customize your offense and defense.

• There are a total of 2 decisions to make on parts. All other parts are just less useful filler.
  
• Those two decisions are, "Which power do you want for your in fight cooldown?" The powers are, essentially, the same.
  

• This is bog standard. There is nothing new or exciting.
  

• They are roadblocks, and poor roadblocks at that. They do nothing interesting.
  

• They are expensive ways to deal with exactly 1(one) type of enemy.
  

• You will have to play over a thousand matches to upgrade the 7-9 cards you actually want to their max.
  
• It takes about 5 seconds to fuse two cards together.
  
• It will take a minimum of 70 minutes,currently, to combine all the cards to level 8. Expect something closer to two hours. There is no combine all button.
  
• Progression is wonky. Expect to attack faster by gaining a certain level and then attack slower by gaining the next.
  

• "Rebels are rules!"
  

• A, singular map to replay. Don't expect to beat it without Corrective Experience.
  

[*]All the mediocre parts of mobile gaming, badly ported to PC. Expect to fight this game to enjoy it.

I decent but flawed tower defense game. The game has strict limits on where you can place towers and how many of each you can place. As far as I can tell, you cannot sell a tower after you've placed it. It relies heavily on buying random card packs, which requires grinding. Not a terrible game, but there are definitely better tower defense games to play.

Low quality game - lot of small bugs, awful animations and annoying sounds, graphics is blured in full-screen mode. Game balance is disappointing.

The art in this game is good, and there are elements of this game that are fun and satisfying. I'm hoping the game creator can make a few tweaks to make this game even better. There were some annoying timers that have been removed, so that criticism has been fixed. My current complaint is that at about level 20, I'm now completely stuck. The difficulty level has become so severe that it's essentially impossible to progress. There needs to be some balancing. I'd recommend the game developer try to beat level 20. I'm guessing all the playtesting was on mobile. Play a runthrough from the start with only the tools provided and try to beat level 20. It's impossible, and it's a bummer I don't get to play through the game. Right now, I'm just farming the survival level trying to upgrade or get to level 15 to get those crystals, but I'm failing at level 13. Currently, everything seems unsolvable in its current state. Highly doubting anyone has beaten this game on PC yet. Fix these issues, and it will be a much better game.

The game uses a somewhat unique system of having you choose a hand of cards. Out of those cards you can pick towers, units, or quick use defenses. This was a unique feature that not many games use currently. You could then upgrade the towers played once you deployed them to preset places.
While the game itself is somewhat enjoyable, the lack of information and lack of options during a map to place towers (your given preset placement options) that most tower defense and building games give is a deal breaker for me.
The further into the game i got the more I realized I was going to keep being limited by the maps forced placements, the RNG that is the ingame booster packs and the fact that I had to grind a few times to ugprade towers through their combining system is what makes me give this game do not recommend.

As for the lack of information. You could see how much damage a unit could do, you could upgrade units and towers to do more damage. What you could NOT do is see how much health was left on a minion going down the lanes. Yes they had a health bar but unless you counted each time a tower shot at them you could not tell how much HP was left on that unit. And when there is 10 units tightly packed sometimes the health bars overlapped or looked like they were merged so it was hard to tell where to bolster defenses.

Audio issues was one of the other deal breakers for me. If multiple of the same sound was played at the same time it would not play them all at once but instead multiply the sound level by however many units shot at once. IE if 5 units fired their gun at the same time you would hear the gunshots at 5x the volume instead of 5 gunshot sounds being heard at once.

Final issue is the fact that you had to spend an ingame currency, that you earned by beating a level without getting hurt, to upgrade your tower cards and unit cards unless you waited out a timer that is ever increasing based on upgrade level. I am told that the newest patch removed the timer and currency putting said timer to 1 second yet I had already spent a good amount and the patch did not refund me after said patch. Meaning I would have to restart my profile in order to recoup what i had spent. Which means playing chance with the ingame RNG of booster packs, match timers and builds etc.

Despite a number of negative reviews, I am really enjoying!! - I don't seem to have a problem with mobile ports.

The card upgrade system is interesting and different levels require different tactics.

One of the few games I have played right through!!

At its current price it is terrific value for money.

[quote]A tower defense with overreliance on randomness and a huge difficulty spike.[/quote]

Pros

• A competent tower defense with upgradable towers, heroes, spells and a robot
  
• Functional graphics
  

Cons

• The game relies on two bad gameplay elements: Randomness and timers
  
• You have to fuse equal cards to upgrade them. Your rewards are random, so you are never guaranteed a certain level card
  
• There are timers everywhere. You have to wait for a card to upgrade, for a reward chest to be available. It very quickly becomes very annoying and the main gameplay element.
  
[*]There is a huge difficulty spike after 30 stars that is probably solvable by waiting for random rewards and then waiting while upgrading them. This is not what I consider fun in a game.

That timer simply should not be here. If they rebalanced the game, removed all timers and added support for higher resolutions (graphics are blurry), I wouldn't mind paying 5 euros. As it stands, it's dirt cheap and also minimum effort mobile port. I've played much better tower defence games for free in the past, because they were actually designed for PC.

The game is simplistic and lacking so many standard features. You can't sell any of the placed towers. Heroes seem worthless after few tutorial levels, unless you get lucky and get some of the legendary ones. There is no targeting, where you would choose which enemies to prioritize. There is so little information about enemies that it's almost ridiculous. All you get is summary of all enemies that you end up fighting before the actual mission happens. Then all you get are health indicators, and on which round you currently are (they won't even tell you how many enemies you are facing in current round). I don't know what level the enemies are (they clearly scale), what are their weaknesses or strenghts and the game won't tell me. I'm also unsure if enemies have any weaknesses, or what is more effective on which enemy. The game doesn't tell you any of that.

I came to this game after seeing its trailer on a co-optional podcast. I thought, huh, it has been while since I had tried a tower defense game, especially one with some form of meta customisation so I thought I would give it a go. At first? Solid enough, I loved the initial carddraw mechanics and gradual raise in power as you went and combined more and more cards. Every hour you even got an increasingly large card reward with some "legendaries" which certainly helped.

But then I hit it, that wall. Suddenly upon reaching the first survial match I went from getting all 3 stars to getting 1 star. Without getting three stars I had no more gem income, without gem income I couldn't "buy" the card packs. So I was basically farming the survival match getting one new random mech piece (and one random pointless area attack thing). I couldnt reach the gems level, so I couldnt farm cards. The game had slowed down to a crawl in more ways then one however.


=== This section has now been fixed. Though, they should have included an additional way to earn when they removed the hourly rewards===
There is a combination system, which, at first seemed really good. Until you realise that each lvl 1 combine takes 1 min, then each level 2 combine takes 2 mins, and so on. It may not seem like much, but once you have a large number of cards from either booster packs or from the "hourly gifts" these add up. Dramatically. Add in the fact that the actual number of cards and towers is pitifully low- the game is definately a miss.

How could they fix it? For one, remove the combination time- this isn't a f2p mobile game anymore, the main use of gems should be purely pack pulls. Also add a "combine all" button so we can combine our whole inventory in one push. When I started to get cards it became stupidly tedious to combine.
=====

Secondly, the game gets stale rather quickly, I suggest adding new rarities to the towers. Everything else has four rarties but towers has none. They are all "common" and a single (useless) legendary factory that takes far FAR too long to repay itself. If there were different levels of rarity I could stack my favourite kinds of towers and hopefully get lucky with a better form as time goes on. In a similar vein, I would remove the gem reward for 3star, replace it with something else, and make a smaller repetitive gem reward for beating levels. This would open the door to further gem purchases such as metaupgrades and new booster pack varieites that would help the game stay fresher longer.

There are a lot of levels, a lot of broader playtime content, but the game far too quickly runs out of content on the tower front and it becomes more about combining and little more. Which is also the single most annoying part. If there were additional rarties of towers, then the choices would really start to matter. Do I want the legendary gattling tower that is stupidly OP and has a tiny number of upgrade slots right now, or the one that starts a little weaker but can be powered up. You could even add additional upgrades to rarer towers to make them more useful, but that isn't too important. In a similar vain, it would also be cool if max upgrades were not 100% decided based on level of tower- if I have a level 4 tower I may want to invest 4 points into one side of the upgrade tree and not touch the other- however the current system is simply linear and removes choice and even a lot of the value in upgrading cards.

Overall, it has promise. The fact they did remove the timers does make the game more "playable", so I must praise them for that. Who knows, they introduce another patch I may be able to change my review. Props for the change.

Interesting take on tower defense, inspired by Kingdom Rush (in my opinion)!

Developers brought nice arts and animations to put us into steampunk world there rebellion is going on.

Gameplay wise there are some familar features - Heroes (few of them) and less to more powerfull towers (4 types) to be unlocked with game progress. But also there are major additions to overall strategy and in every battle tactics:
- we're allowed to chose wich towers or heroes we want on every location - we pick them as cards to fill a limitied deck. Yes, towers and heroes and other stuff - cards here
- every hero, tower and robot part (see below) are subject to upgrades (simply by stacking cards of same level in separate interface we may craft a higher level card)
- winning round rewards differently depending on how good you performed - additional cards or crystals and crystals are very useful. E.g. to revive hero on the battlefield or remove wait timer on cards crafting. Crystal can also be used as currency in ingame store (no real money microtransactions included) to buy sets of cards.
- survival mode! It is very very praiseworthy mode to vary the game expierence.

- we can defend our base entrance with huge steam-powered robot as our last defence line; and we may upgrade that robot's systems - weapons, armor, power sources
- we can't sell towers that were once placed though

All that provides times more strategies to develope than usual wich is amazing.

Also, there is some sort of passive rewards for a time spent in game - cards with upgrades drops every hour and the longer you play the game the more rare cards you get. It is convinient for a strategy there we usually lose the count to hours, righ?

Back to arts - there are some aminated cut scenes telling us the story behind our rebellion, but so far I just learnt the type of next round boss from these. Judging on a lo-o-ong road through the world map, there are many battles to win before we get to the final of this steampunk story which is exciting for such a humble price!

Interfaces are nice and intuitive, tutorial is in place and it is both short and informative, so you won't be confused to learn how operate the game. Though being mobile port game kept some interface features, like drag'n'drop to operate the cards.

Soundtrack is simple, but pleasant in the way. Interface sounds are OK. Sounds in battle though might me annoying.

On the downside, I see no Steam achievements for the game yet. Also, first few rounds might make you think game is oversimpliefied, but wait for the round 8 and you'll be challenged over-the-top.

Fresh, challenging solid tower defence with good arts for such a moderate price - there is no doubt in my mind to recommend it to everyone who loves good old towerdefence genre.

Should have checked before purchase but it's just a port of mobile game. I can't recommend it. Now if you really want to play a mobile tower defence game on PC then then sure go ahead.

Cons:
* Time gated mechanics. Upgrades and rewards are delayed by real time like in mobile games. Can skip time delay by spending crystal resource which would typically be the purchased resource on mobile but doesn't seem to be option to purchase here.
* No options other than audio levels and fullscreen or windowed. Can't change resolution or anything else.
* Tutorial popup windows tend to block actual information on screen preventing you from really understanding what's happening.
* Made for touch screen interface so incredibly simplistic and doesn't understand things like right clicking or other actions that are intuitive on PC for getting information or options. Lots of drag and drop actions required.

Pros:
* Nice art style
* Seems to be a decent number of cards though haven't played enough to get a feel for how different or useful they all are.
* Quick and easy to jump right into playing

Overall I wouldn't recommend. It's cheap but it's not really a game that's worth the time to me and I don't like games that disrespect my time by gating mechanics with timers. I'm also one that doesn't like these mechanics on mobile so if you are OK or even like these mechanics on mobile then you may like the game more.