Tower Dominion (2025)

This was a difficult game to score out of 5 stars. I would call it a solid 7/10 which is a 3.5 on the 5 star scale. So here are the reasons of why I went with only 3 stars.

About 45 hours of total play time.

Pros

• In all the tower defense games I dove into this summer, this was the best of them.
• Plenty of value for your dollar, even if you set a simple goal (as I did) of just completing a couple of Tier IV runs and getting at least Tier II+ with all commanders, you'll get a really good amount of playtime.
• Lots of varied, and in my personal opinion, AWESOME building types. From boom boom to pew pew.
• The ability to convert any game into endless mode as soon as you finish your tiered run is awesome. Tower defense games should ALWAYS allow that kind of fun.
• Enemy diversity is nice.

Cons

• Not enough focus on the strategy element. Because everything is random, it's very difficult to pick a consistent strategy. And mob randomness means that every now and then, you'll have an awesome build that will just get overwhelmed because your rock got papered.
• Some teams are extremely weak in the early game making them frustrating to play, once established most teams will basically play the same.
• The pathing for vehicles and troops probably needs a rework. Rather than reading the path with the most hp, it should be "shortest distance intercept the path with the most hp". Can't tell you how many games I have where the troops or tanks are coming out of the rear and slowly working their way into the fight because end game mobs are on that path even though they won't complete it for a while.
• In fact, it would be nice if all pathing was clearer. Enemies, vehicles, and troops.
• After Tier II, the starting tiles play a huge role in how successful your run can be.
• I believe multi-front builds could be really strong, but are only good against certain end game creatures and overall, condensing to a single lane appears to be the only strategy that is consistently viable. For instance, if your end game mob is forced to maximize travel, huge multi-front maps are extremely good. If your late game mobs end up being cloaked, fast, or group focused though, they will have a quicker path to the base.
• Even though I believe all commanders are viable, there are some really fun commanders (ones that provide awesome buffs, HQ defense, or lots of resources), other commanders seem too situational to be consistently fun.
• I disagree with how they chose to do battlefront calculations. I think a battlefront should be drawn as directly as possible from map entrance to base entrance, if that route is unique it is one battle front (this would self hard cap at the number of base connections). This would allow for early game consolidation, late game spread.
• If you play and get frustrated early because tiers I and II are too easy and III is quite the difficulty jump, I recommend just doing a bunch of Tier II runs. Why is this tip a con? Because some of the games early difficulty is nothing more than not unlocking some of the better buildings and directives. It doesn't feel like it's advancement as much as just grinding.
• 50 - 60 waves appears to be the soft cap. This is because monsters not only get harder, but they all appear to dramatically scale. I do not like this form of "balancing" in tower defense games and it contributes to the soft cap. It's meant to not be kept up with. I'd rather have a 100 wave hard cap then a soft cap that there is no way to keep up with. There's no reason that a level 49 slug-thing that nearly dies should all of a sudden deposit all his small ones he was carrying and one shot my base. It also makes base health rather meaningless, because by wave 30+, in 95% of my games, I either take 0 damage or die.
• Walls are just a stationary troop. Because the game doesn't require mobs to attack a wall, in late game the big ones don't even have to stop. I'm okay with this, as it's the games mechanic, but it would be nice to see an upgrade for walls that at least caused like a slow bomb to go off when a wall is defeated.

Recommendations

• Expand the capabilities of recon, discovery, and multi-front builds.
• Consider a deck-building type of approach, allowing specific strategies to take shape. Instead of telling players how many cards they may hold in their virtual "deck" maybe allowing only so many "exclusions" from the build making others more likely.
• The tile system in my opinion needs a full rework. The ability to lay your first tiles would prevent the need to look at a map and go "nope clearly not going to be a winner". Maybe offer us number of entrances + 2 tiles to select from and where to place them.
• Also, I think we need to get more tiles, it would be cool to actually build weaving paths, but given that tile placement is so important (especially in the early game), and by late game it can take too long to go anywhere, this feature needs a rework. The best tower defense games allows you to weave paths giving guns multiple chances at a target. For a number of reasons, the games tiles don't really support this because you don't get enough.
• If there is ever a Tower Dominion 2 I'd love to see a commander RPG tree. This doesn't really effect the review, but I wanted to just say it.
• Institute a gap between end of a tiered run and the true endless mode. Allowing players to enjoy an additional challenge without being crushed by quickly scaling enemies. Or have the endless mode scale less harshly. I'd like to imagine that a wave 100 would be possible. Even if that caused the game to end and not be truly endless.

Conclusions

I'm sure some of you instantly thought "but bro, your recommendations would make the game too easy". My response is, so? At the end of the day, just finishing a tier is not that difficult as most of my games end up kicked into endless mode. Since it's just wave after wave, let us have some fun eh?

Anyways, game is worth it if you like tower defense games and it doesn't do anything much outside of that.