Tower Defence Boiled Down To Its Purest Form - Tower Dominion
Here on the Chogg.Blog, the Flick Through Review was supposed to be a shortform take away from a book, game or film but has often spiralled into me waxing lyrical about things I love. This review, about a game I could describe in five words, might challenge my ability to drag my praise out.
I spoke a little while ago, in my Assassin’s Creed Revelations review, about tower defence games. They are a staple of the genre, often an ‘open in another tab’ game that you can half play until you lose and start over. Sometimes they are incredibly easy like simple browser games that are supposed to be beaten in one sitting. Sometimes, like Element TD 2, the game is a mound of complexities that never really settles into itself. And then there are little sparkling gems that are easy to miss but when we find them they become the game that we use to talk about tower defence games for the next little while. For as long as I’ve been paying attention, that game has been Bloons Tower Defence, with an extra entry in the series released every few years and delivering simple basics, varied upgrade paths and a little bit of progression to keep us hooked. These games are very fun, if a little inexplicable with dart throwing monkeys, banana currency and leopard print balloon enemies, although I always end up losing and quitting and putting off another attempt.
I think Bloons might have been upstaged. For good.
Tower Dominion
I received a copy of Tower Dominion for free when it initially released, not long after my ranked list of Tower Defence games on GameRant. Naturally, I thought I was pretty much an expert. Starting it up, its a lot like what you would expect, inviting you to start a run as quickly as possible to get you into the meat of the game. I saw a lot of different character silhouettes, that I assumed were different cosmetics, and I booted the game with the first military-looking fella I had. The game immediately shows its hand, and by the first few waves it is hypnotic in its replayability and breadth of options.
The map starts with a number of enemy entry points that equals your difficulty level - a stupidly simple but clever bit of design. Every couple of waves, we get a chance to slot a new piece of randomly generated track into the map like a cartoon military jigsaw. This will expand not only the paths that enemies take to get to our base, but also the available land to pop our weapons onto. Baddies walk in, as you might expect. But this game breaks apart from convention with regular weird perks to choose from that make every single run a mixture of careful planning ahead and lucky draws. Perks range from giving players more resources or upgrading their health to buffing one type of tower if you only have one of them. They can shift the strategy of any run in a heartbeat. Even your towers are chosen from a random pool each wave, meaning that your plans can fall apart or be made so much better at the will of the RNG-sus.
All of our buildings have three tiers of upgrades, each of which gives the player a pair of bonuses to choose between. This even includes our base, that can be given weapons or bonus resource production. And I was a little surprised at how much I adore this. The game favours simplicity, but gives me just enough choice at every single point - the map shape, the weapons I have access to, how much damage they can do and how much money I have left - that I am responsible for everything. When I beat a tricky round with no issue, I feel like a professional and wish someone was watching over my shoulder to see how good I am. And then, when the next wave looks like my towers didn’t even pose a threat to the horde of bug creatures as they walked into my base, I know that some combination of every one of my decisions added up to bring me to my (in retrospect, quite funny) defeat.
Replayability And Progression
None of these ideas is new. It would be naïve of me to pile all of this praise on Tower Dominion without acknowledging that there are plenty of other games that are doing this stuff. But the impression that I get is that nowhere are all of these elements so masterfully combined into one massive experience better than here in this cartoon military game. After finishing a few runs, I started to pay attention to all of the unlocks that appeared in between the action. Characters, who each bring their own unique bonuses that change the way you play. Some have their own small buildings, or give huge bonuses if players build only adjacent to their home base. Others, split into different classes, produce recon to reroll some of the more random parts of the game, hoping to stave off any run-ending bad luck. The rerolls never protected me, though…
Others still march out into your paths and actually fight the enemies on the map, making the whole thing feel more like an automated game of Risk. It’s pitch perfect. Unlocking new perks, difficulties and characters - each of which is a nod to a classic character - was only topped by new final wave modifiers which were as entertaining as they were terrifying. So many runs of mine were stopped dead by enemies that drop in halfway or all have camouflage. But after every defeat, unlike Bloons, I was so eager to try again. It became the perfect ‘one-more-run’ game, and any other tabs were closed so my whole attention could be on fulfilling a goal for a new unlock or trying to spec into the new character so that they each had a chance to shine of the higher difficulties.
All that to say, the five-word description of Tower Dominion should be plastered in the Steam description: The Best Tower Defence Game. Bringing all of its seperate elements and choices into a rewarding package that will be hard to beat. Certainly better than Assassin’s Creed Revelations’ tower defence, that’s for sure.
Thanks for reading my newest Chogg.Blog! If you liked it, make sure to share this with someone who might like it, or with someone who might not - I’m not picky. You can donate to help me keep doing this over on the ‘about’ page, and let me know what you thought of this one over on Instagram or in the comments below. Check out Tower Dominion on Steam, and tell them I sent you! Stay tuned for some exciting Halloween things to come! Thanks again <3
