• Playtime: 1,5 hours (tutorial completed, 20% discovered)

• Played: 2026

• Context: I love Tower Defense games but many are bad. I generally dislike roguelikes.

Review

Nordhold is probably one of the worst 76+ TDs i've played since 1992. Most of the gameplay is actually balancing the plethora of economic options instead of killing things with towers.

The actual Tower Defense part is awful. There is only a single map. Yes, i'm not joking. The map randomly expands the terrain and path a bit with each wave, you have no control over this. There is no mazing, no planning chokepoints and no real strategy to tower placement since you will almost always pick the hexes with the best range bonuses.

Worse still, tower upgrades are done through a typical roguelike 'pick from three random options' system and come in various random qualities. You can do everything right and still lose because the upgrades you got are weak or for the wrong tower. I imagine this only gets worse after you spend the hours it takes to grind upgrade points to actually unlock all towers.

Finally, the towers, spells and enemies are beyond bland. Arrow tower, fireball spell, humanoid bandit. It honestly feels like the devs came up with the economic system, spent most of their time on that and tacked on the roguelike TD part because it took the least amount of effort. It would've been so easy to make this much better, even just letting players pick from three areas to expand with and where would've gone a long way.

3/10