Tower Wars

My honest take on Tower Wars: the core idea is cleverer than its 59 Metacritic score suggests, and the people who get it tend to get really into it. The format is competitive tower defense where both sides are simultaneously building and attacking. You maze up a hex-grid field with eight tower types - arrow towers, ballistics, a giant mallet, a wind fan, a molten lava factory - while spending a dual-currency economy of gold and battle points to assemble and send unit waves into your opponent's field. Gold runs your mines and tower budget, battle points (earned by how long your units stay alive on the enemy side) fund upgrades. Balancing those two economies under live pressure is where the actual strategy lives, and it is genuinely satisfying once it clicks. The unit roster includes named characters like Mr. Moopsy (your basic grunt), Baron von Pepto (healer), Madam Sudsie Lennor (shield boost), and Stanley Clunkerbottom (a robot, because of course). There's a tech tree for unlocking and upgrading these. Waves are on a cooldown timer that starts at 45 seconds and can be shortened through upgrades, so you can't just stockpile a monster army - the game forces constant pressure, which keeps matches active. Maps mirror each side, and a dotted pathfinding line updates in real time as you place towers, so you can watch your maze force enemies to walk further and take more fire. Smart placement is the game. The open grid means every match layout is slightly different, especially since gold mine positions are randomized. Here's where it falls apart, though. There are only three maps. Three. For a multiplayer-first game, that content floor is uncomfortably low, and it was called out at launch and never meaningfully addressed. The single-player Classic TD mode exists only as a fallback - a handful of wave-survival maps where you can only defend, not attack. The signature versus mechanic is locked to multiplayer. The tutorial covers the surface and then drops you into ranked where the skill gap is steep and matchmaking, even at launch, struggled to find balanced opponents. In 2024, concurrent player counts are in the single digits. The community uses a Discord server to coordinate matches manually because the queue is effectively dead. If you go in blind expecting to find a ranked 1v1 in a reasonable timeframe, you will not. The art style is a polished steampunk cartoon - colorful, readable mid-match, scales down to lower-spec hardware without looking bad. Performance is not a concern on any modern machine. Cross-platform PC and Mac play works, which mattered more when people were actually playing. Workshop support is there if you want to poke at mods. The game has a small but loyal remnant community that clearly loves it, and with a pre-arranged group of two to five players for 2v2 or 3v3, it reportedly holds up as a solid session game even years later. But that condition - bring your own lobby - is a hard prerequisite, not an asterisk.

Fred · Scout Team

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