Lord_Of_Sabers

Tower Wars is a tower defense game combined with army building. This indie title was released in August 2012, so has been around for a while coming in with about 400k owners on Steam. As with other tower defense games, you start out with a blank battlefield, although this version of tower defense is slightly different to others, you are also fighting against an opponent, who is also building towers on their blank battlefield. The aim of the game is to get your army into the enemies base to destroy their castle before they destroy yours. Tower Wars has two currency systems, Gold and Battle points - you are able to generate gold via the mines which are already located on your map; you can do the usual technique with tower defense games and upgrade them so that they generate more gold and are quicker at it. Battle points come through sending units to your opponent and working their way to the castle, this of course requires gold though. You build units from your barracks with gold, there is a build queue which you can fill up however you please with different assorted units which you can train, and then push them all out in one go. Your barracks has a cool down so you can only push one wave out every 40 seconds or so. Some units are basic, some have their own special abilities, and some even increase the stats of the whole wave, regardless of whether they are near the units or not. The tower building side of things is again, very similar to other tower defense games, you are able to position your towers pretty much anywhere you want on the map, allowing you to create all sorts of death traps, and corridors that your foe has to battle through, obviously the more ground the opponent has to cover, the more damage you can do to them with your turrets. There are plenty of the normal sort of turrets, such as cannons and arrow launchers, but there are also some really unique ones, such as a huge fan that pushes your opponents back in a certain direction, this makes for some great end of hallway traps! All of the turrets are able to be upgraded in the usual fashion too, however I didn't really find the need to do that in the single player mode. Tower Wars has a really nice looking graphic and art style; they are really polished and it looks like a lot of care and attention has gone into making this a beautiful steam-punk looking game. The difficulty in Tower Wars takes a huge ramp up once you get past the tutorial. I will say though, the game's tutorial is really helpful and gets you to grips with the UI and all of the basic elements of the game. It does leave out a few bits that mean you have to go digging around and use a bit of trial and error to see what is what, but that's part of the fun of this type of game. There are also an abundance of guides, and wiki posts out there if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it. Since the game is almost four years old now, the multiplayer scene seems to have died down a bit, at the time of writing this there are only ~30 people playing the game, but thankfully the game does have the option for co-op, so that may peek the attention of some people Technically, this game has a lot of graphical options, allowing you to cater it for your rigs power and capability, coming with plenty of resolution options too. I have put about six hours into Tower Wars so far, and given that matches against the UI/Bots can sometimes last anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour, you can expect to get a lot of gameplay out of this even on the single player mode. If you manage to find **** of friends to play this with, you are looking at a major time sink with ample amounts of fun and content. I will definitely be carrying on playing Tower Wars after writing this review, since it also has that addicted sort of gameplay that I just cannot put down. Thankfully, due to the price of Tower Wars being £5,59, I am going to strongly recommend this title, if it was any more I would have just said to pick it up when on sale due to the lack of multiplayer activity, but because it is already a low price as it stands, I can easily say you will get at least five or six hours of enjoyment out of it. Hardcore tower defense fans should not miss out on this game!