Tower Defense Central

*****

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*****

🧙 Is the game fun? It’s alright. Apparently it’s supposed to be both an idle game and a tower defense game but even if those two genres could conceivably go together, it doesn’t feel like this game is doing it right. I found that the game does accumulate coins and stuff when the app is closed but other than that it doesn’t really work like other idle games? And I feel like when I’m playing a tower defense game I don’t want to just exit out and then check in to see how things are going later, I want to be monitoring the wave and upgrading my defenses and the like. But it also has the boring waiting aspect of idle games as it can take a long time to accumulate enough currency to upgrade/summon monsters and you will also die a lot which causes you to go back several waves and repeat the waves you just did with the only difference being you can rearrange your defenses, which there are only nine fixed slots to place defenses in anyway.

Maybe I’m just not playing it right but I really didn’t get it and it got pretty tedious after a while. There isn’t a lot of variety in enemies between waves and after about 50 waves (the last 10 of which I had to repeat numerous times) there was no change in environment or new features to work with other than being able to get new monsters through summoning. But the artwork is really cute and there is decent variety of stats for the monsters/towers that boost the stats of monsters around it that made trying to get the ideal arrangement of defenses on the board the most appealing part of the game. I just wish there was more variety throughout the rest of the game and that the idle part was better explained or just worked in more naturally than it was.

🗡 Is this a free game or a “free” game? It’s a free game. As with most free-to-download games there are in-app purchases you can make but they’re not super necessary to progress although they would make things go faster. The monsters are summoned through a gacha system but you can slowly build up the currency you need for draws through achievements and watching ads.

🪨 Features

Tower defense waves (other than the nine positions you can place monsters in, there are stone walls that slow down enemies and can be attacked and broken down by some enemies, but you can’t move or customize them in any way. You also have manually-cast attacks like a fireball and freeze attack that refresh over time. Every 10 waves there is usually a boss/bosses with special abilities like freezing your monsters or speeding up other enemies)

Gacha summoning system (there are a few different types of currency you can accumulate to summon different rarity classes of monsters, monster upgrades or stat-boosting towers. As with other gacha games, the monsters you get are based on chance rates and you don’t get to choose what you get, you can just improve your chance of getting a rarer monster/item by summoning from a more expensive pool)

Occasional opportunities to get additional currency by paying another currency (ex. A trader approaches you and offers you 2 diamonds for 50 coins) or watch an ad to receive currency

Achievements from completing certain tasks, which reward you in premium currency (diamonds)

Events (the only events I’ve seen are summoning events where an event character will come along with a wave, usually going faster than the other enemies, and if you manage to kill them you get summoning stones to summon an event monster - if you don’t you don’t lose the wave though. I played around Christmastime so I got summoning stones by killing Santa lol. You need a lot of summoning stones to summon the event monster though)

I think there was a storyline at the beginning but it didn’t really come up again

⚖️ Ad Honesty Rating: 4/5 (I wasn’t sure how to rate a game where basically all of the ads are memes about how they don’t have fake ads lol but I looked through their ad library on Facebook and there was one ad that showed real gameplay screenshots so overall it is pretty honest, both in that it doesn’t run fake ads and it’s not lying about not running fake ads. I docked it one point though due to most of the ads not showing you what the game is about and one ad on Facebook that claimed it was easy to progress really fast without paying money which I didn’t find to be true playing the game myself)

⭐️ Overall Rating: 3/5 (it’s playable and has cute art but just bored me overall. Maybe it’s more enjoyable if you know how the idle system is supposed to work)

📱 Ad Examples: (the game doesn’t seem to have any video ads which is unusual)

▶️ Gameplay Example: