Technotron Defense

It's a cheap and fun little game, The Tower defense is engaging, the variety and types of enemies keep you on your toes, and the challenge is often a lot greater than it first seems, which makes succeeding all the more satisfying!

Thirty minutes in, and I feel I can already write a review on this one.
Basic bare-bones TD game. It seems to work, with a few odd bugs (For example, I have never gotten a score, even though I have beaten quite a few levels) and from the look of it, no support.
To be fair, I am not returning this game, and expect to play it thru to the end, TD games are too few and far between.
That said, the look is nice, mimicking the vector graphics of some arcade games from the eighties. (Battle Zone comes to mind, easy to imagine them being in the same universe.) The techo-music is pretty cool as well.
There is pathing, though so far the options are pretty basic. There are flying units, and I guess there will be cloaked ones as well, as there is a tower that reveals them.
One interesting idea is that the blocks you use for pathing, which are often simply cheap and do nothing, can be upgraded to do a few things, see cloaked, zone of slow, zone of buffing other towers and one other that slips my mind.
Tower upgrades are lackluster, up a time or two with no options or choices. You don't get the option to decide how the towers targets the enemies, none of the bells and whistles that should be standard by now.
That said, I am enjoying it, can't give it a thumbs down. Get it on sale if you can, but worth a play.

fun game. great music. smooth visuals. challenging.

I've been on a tower defense kick recently and bought seven tower defense games at once; Technotron is the first out of the batch I played. It was cheap and I was attracted to its bright retro aesthetic.

In terms of tower defense, Technotron is the barest minimum. If, like me, you found your love for tower defense by playing browser TD games two decades ago, you'll find Technotron is nostalgic of the era and has nothing new to add, nor does it do well at the bare minimum. The retro aesthetic makes it hard to differentiate one type of tower from another, not to mention one upgraded tower versus its lower-tiered brethren. Waves start, come and go, and lives are taken without any indicator at all, oftentimes making it hard to make sense of the neon mess on screen. Upgrades are standard (+ to damage, range, etc.) and don't seem to help enough to justify the cost.

Technotron is the type of TD game where you can set towers and/or walls down to block certain paths and make enemy pathways longer. The amount of money you start with is so low that any strategy utilizing this is slow to start and even slower to develop (as you'll want to upgrade towers to defeat increasingly harder enemies before you can afford to buy towers/walls to block paths). There's no indicator to show you when a tower is ready to upgrade; you have to click through each one to figure out if you can afford to make it better. There's also no indicator for when you unlock new towers, nor which buttons control what. For example: I clicked pause at the beginning of a level to plan my strategy and figure out what the towers were, and the wave started anyway. I later found out I had paused the music, not the game. The soundtrack's pause button is in the top right corner of the screen, where most TD games have their control commands.

Let's talk about the bugs, which have been mentioned in other reviews. For an excessively simple game, Technotron has a lot of them. Waves fail to spawn. Menus get stuck. Most egregiously, halfway through a level my mouse input stopped working. Literally everything I tried to click on had no response. I couldn't upgrade towers, pause the game, or do anything but go to the menu, so I lost the level after spending time and energy setting up my strategy. That's when I decided my time with Technotron was done.

Out of nearly 1600 games in my library, Technotron Defense is only the second I've refunded. The soundtrack is decent if you like 80s synth music (I do), but I didn't buy the game for its soundtrack, nor will I hear it if the game itself isn't good enough to spend time in. Unlike many gamers, I don't need my tower defense games to add new things to the genre in order to play and love them. Technotron doesn't, but it also doesn't excel at the standard or even manage to work up sufficient excitement, particularly considering its myriad of bugs and issues. This game gets a hard pass from me.

Para haber costado menos de un dólar está muy bien. Pero las respuestas en las torretas, y sus animaciones dejan una sensación de que están mal hechas, o de manera amateur, eso no quiere decir que sea un mal juego, me parece altamente recomendable para juegos casuales.

Lots to love! Price is excellent! Some annoying things to watch out for but not a dealbreaker.


Pros:

* Synthwave theme!! Takes Tower Defense to a retro future place!
* Price ($1 or less) is excellent!
* Graphics are simple yet look cool. The paths are grids.
* Music is great!
* Variety of towers and support buildings.

Campaigns get harder and harder. There are some tricks to passing the last few levels. You can buy and sell Tesla towers for a profit. That also helps once you get into Trials.

Trials, so far, seem to be endless. Just played and I want to say I was in around round 60-70 or so and there didn't seem to be an end boss yet. Could be 100 levels? Anyone know?

Music is great. Although, if you play the game a lot then you might want to mute the music after awhile and fire up a Synthwave playlist of your own. =)


Cons:

* Needs some minor bug fixes from the creator to raise the polish on the game.

Noticed the pop-up sell/buy window isn't given priority over what's underneath. That means you have to scroll sideways until there's no buildings under the window. Could be easily fixed if that window blocks anything in that window area from being clicked while it's open.

Also, seems the pop-up buy/sell window stops appearing by that second game. It's like it gets stuck on a click somewhere. The easy fix would be to prioritize right clicking (cancel) over left clicking (action).

Similarly, you click to buy a building and it won't let you cancel until you place it. If you had no spots left then that would be a round breaker.


Summary:

Overall, it's worth the inexpensive price. Play it here and there and you'll enjoy it. Recommend just playing one round and then exiting. Play again after that or just play one round. That'll help you avoid the clicking bug.

This is a very bare bones tower defense game with a unique visual approach. Nothing pushes the genre forward, but it is a decent timewaster. Be warned that in my short playtime I had several waves fail to spawn, leaving my game stuck on x3 speed and no way to finish the level.

Get it on sale.

Short and basic game. Made with love, but with not enough skill. So it's cute, enjoyable, but full of minor discomforts and bugs. Like, enemies start to run right after the setting of a first tower. With this interface it's a bit hard to build a tower maze fast enough. You can't rotate the camera, despite we can see it on video. That's why sometimes you select the tower on the field instead of buying new. Then you try to place it, found out that you have empty hands, go back to the shop line... And the moment is lost. And so on, and so forth.
On the other side, it balanced very well. I really liked to play. Weapons are useful and nice, just like support towers. Music is awesome and fit perfectly. Price is very fair. So, I absolutely recommend it.

A few bugs that need fixing. I passed the secon level but it never quit and move on so I was unable to go to the next level. Great music an atmosphere. Giving thunbs up for now, might change if bugs are not fixed.

lovely neon + basic tower defense = <3

Really enjoying this game, for me its the next best tower defense game since defense grid. Even with its very annoying bugs. The game is playable, some levels do require a good few multiple tries to get them right.

Probably the most annoying thing, now and then for some reason you can't click on the towers to upgrade, kidna game breaking, then after a few minutes it comes back. Its also not obvious which towers attack air and the first time i had an wave with air enemies i had no idea that the laser towers can shoot air.

For the price its a no brainer, anymore and i would say no but i've had quite a few hours of enjoyment from this. This genre has a lot of rubbish games imo, but this could potentially be brilliant if the developer was able carry on supporting it.

Decent simple tower defense game, with a fun aesthetic. A few key elements are not explained at all (such as how to build a detector) but with enough clicking around I found everything. There are a few waves I wasn't able to solve with towers alone, but manipulating the pathing mid-wave beat them. It took around 6 hours to get though all of the missions.

The Trials mode pits you against unlimited waves in a randomly generated map. It sounds cool in theory, but there's no score at the end so you don't have a way to compare plays. This one feels like a wasted potential.

Some bugs I ran into include occasionally not being able to click on a tower (which makes it impossible to upgrade or sell), and Trials mode setting my starting money to whatever I had left in the last game I played (which can make things hilariously easy or impossible to buy anything). All bugs I saw were fixed by restarting the game.

Despite the oddities the main game is worth a play through if you're into this kind of game.

Solid tower defense made from pure, distilled 80's. It's difficult but not impossible, the soundtrack is synth-tastic (devs, I would buy the OST if it were available. Just sayin') the visuals are lovely (if you're a neon fan, mind you) and your choices of tower are useful and straightforward. As another user mentioned, the ability to upgrade wall blocks into a variety of defenses was neat and appreciated. Overall it's cheap and fun to play - give it a shot!

The Best Cheap Tower Defence Game On Steam

I have a lot of TD games on Steam and I've played cheap ones and expensive ones. This is the best of the cheap ones.


Technotron Defense is a very solid and rewarding TD game. Despite the stylised graphics and music it is actually the most orthodox and conventional of all the cheap TD games I've played on Steam. It is simply that which makes me recommend it so highly. Many of the cheap TD games have some awful gimmick in lieu of interesting gameplay. If Hidden Path made a budget version of their Defense Grid series then it would most likely play a lot like Technotron Defense. I really can't pay it any higher compliment than that.

There is a campaign and a Trials mode. I completed the campaign in 5.4 hours. Each map (there are 13 in the campaign) can be tackled in multiple ways and there is also mazing to a lesser or greater degree on each of the maps. This isn't one of those TD games which has only a few locations on which to place your towers.

The game is reasonably difficult but not frustratingly so. It is far more approachable than the TD mobile ports which have made their way on to Steam but haven't shed the grindy gameplay in the transition. This game follows the tried and tested formula of classic TD gameplay which is basically a slightly more complex version of rock, paper, scissors. You get new enemies to fight but you also get new towers with which to fight them.

Technotron Defense seems to have been made for the PC as there is no grind, no tech-tree, no investing in towers to make them a tiny bit better and no stars awarded upon completing a level. I like that the inexpensive blocking towers can be converted into multiple use support towers by upgrading the basic structure.

The game has holographic dancing girls on the maps as you play the game but in the heat of battle I stopped noticing their gyrations and concentrated on killing the enemies. :)

There are a few minor annoyances. Sometimes it is hard to click on a tower to upgrade it or select and place a newly bought tower and the tower purchase bar at the bottom of the screen can get in the way occasionally. Also the graphics settings don't stick in the game options when changing them from the Unity launcher although that may be a problem with Unity itself.

This game just does the basics of a TD game very well. I find the graphics pleasing to the eye and the excellent 80s synth soundtrack is an added bonus. You have full control over the music as you play the game with pause, forward and rewind buttons so you can play which ever track you like or none at all.

I would have liked an option to replay the campaign maps in a "Super Grinder" format with a hundred waves of enemies like in the Defense Grid games. There may be something like this in the Trials mode of the game but I haven't played that mode yet.

I paid 39p for this game while it was discounted during the recent 2018 Steam Lunar Sale. The "full" price is only 79p which is around $1. I would have happily paid four or five times what I did. At the current price this game is a steal.

Highly recommended.

simple. boring, and explains little.
music is pasable but also is listening to a pair of 80' synthwave videos on youtube.

A simple and elegant Tower Defense with good graphics, music and gameplay.
At $0.99, I don't see how you can go wrong!!
Have not hit the later levels that some complained about, but I have already had my money's worth.
Why has nobody mentioned the dancing girls, it took me a while to notice them - I think I am in love!

This game is bad, but that's not the reason I'm giving it a down vote.

IT ACTUALLY BROKE MY COMPUTER

I might not have been on purpose but it will not stop showing the message that another computer is running technotron defense and no matter how many times I restart my computer or steam it continues to make any game unplayedable

That's not the only problem with the game, infact it really BORING and it's almost impossible to wina level on your first try.

The main selling point for me was the soundtrack cause vaporwave and stuff like that is my S*** but I can say that the entire soundtarck has around 6 F****** SONGS.

The level stages are ruined with these ugly ass looking robot pole dancers that are around the map sometimes, TITS IN THE GAME IS GOOD IF THE GAME HAS SOME GOOD TITS BUT IF THE TITS ARE BAD THEN THIS IS A VERY SILLY MARKETING POINT.

Scrolling round the map sucks, not much else to say about that.

Sometimes depending on where you place a turret it can make it impossible to upgrade it or sell it.

You can place walls but due to the lack of space its close to being pointless.
3/10 broke my pc but it's 80p lol

Music and art style create a soothing atmosphere contrasted by challenging and fast-paced gameplay.

Pros:
- Great soundtrack
- Simple clean art
- Very difficult, later levels require solid shaping plan and build order
- Great price

Cons:
- No simple way to restart the level before failing it.
- First wave comes too quickly, forcing level review offline
- No targeting priority options
- No Achievements

Edit, the developer has listened to its users and tweaked the game and I am happy to say i am going to lose many hours playing this again. Hats off to you. Highly recommended

I really started to enjoy this game. The playability was fun, the graphics great and very unique and the soundtrack cool. However I have had to abandon this game as in later levels it is setup so it is impossible to progress. This is a design Flaw whether it be intentional or not so for that I cannot recommend it as you will get a maximum of a couple of hours fun out of it before you will get frustrated and abandon it.

For the price, this game is very easy to recommend. Even if you just play long enough to hear the entire soundtrack once or twice it is worth the experience, because this game does have quite a bit of personality. However, I bought this game because I thought it was going to be super chill and casual but that was definitely not the case. I wound up pretty much giving up on being able to complete the campaign because the later levels are just plain rediculous.

I bought it for the soundtrack and was not disappointed. The game is very simple, there barely are any controls, but the 80's neon punk feel it brings is just amazing. For the price it's a nobrainer. Just buy it, because it's almost free, while also being an amazing 80's nostalgia trip with some TD mixed in that actually is not just a self playing game. I did find some challenge in it and have to admit that thre is fun in the gameplay as well, as there is awesome music.