Drageus releases always demonstrate a willingness to push into new territory with standard genres. Feeling innovative and forever expanding,I’ve reviewed quite a few titles for this team,and although I’ve always welcomed the new take on an old idea. There’s been a little drawback in that the run on the new circuit,never seems to quite make it past the finishing line !
Especially when it comes to an often tricky take on tower defence. Get the elements wrong and the game becomes repetitive,dull and often too linear to hold interest and warrant continuous gameplay. Get the elements right,and you get a title rather like this one..
Steampunk Tower is primarily tower defence but with much more added into the mix. There’s a large emphasis on base building,adopted into a European open world campaign setting,all characterised and richly infused with the largely favourable steampunk aesthetic.
The story in itself,is not typical groundbreaking or new. The world is under the threat of a mysterious militia organisation known as the cult,and close to global domination.Using all their influence and powers to take away,kidnap and use the pioneers of science and technology to develop factories and weapons of mass destruction.
There’s a faint glimmer of hope and a return to peace from a small allied resistance group. From a secret base location in Southern Europe,a man has a blueprint and a plan .. a tower weapon that could be developed and eventually strong and powerful enough to battle and defeat the cult insurgence around the various cities around the world. Take back the cities,take the factories developing new technologies and get the leading scientists on your side,to eventually create a tower superweapon of devastating proportions,and a resistance strong enough to regain control and influence,destroy the baddies and bring back peace and harmony once again.
At its beating heart,the actual tower defence battles are pretty decent and require a good deal of involvement and strategy. From an hovering aircraft,the tower is dagger shaped and drops into the ground,a la war of the worlds,and after each battle is lifted by helicopters in a couple of preset cutscenes that are novel and nicely thought out.
For your initial first battles,the tower is equipped with just two slots for two basic machine gun placements with enemies advancing from the left or/and right sides.
A good element of strategy comes with the reload/cool down requirement,that means you have to pull the placement back into the centre of the tower,as you can’t just wait and expect guns to keep constantly firing. Eventually,each placement will begin to glow, and you can then select a special temporary ability like multiple gunfire,requiring a button press and moving an aiming reticule for a burst of firepower at your chosen target. Certain waves/attacks will also only come from one side,and placements can also be moved from side to side if the space allows it. Looking and feeling a bit like those sliding tile puzzles at times.
Once you get a few battles under your belt. The awards of coin and parts from each battle victory,become the integral part of the game and the secret in upgrading your tower and artillery placements. Soon you’ll get more slots on the tower to add more weapons and your base camp will soon grow to allow factories to build more varied weaponry like missile,electric and laser cannons. You will also be able to build up the main factory to upgrade the main towers wall strength and unlock tower special weapons. These are activated by increasing a kind of mana guage in the top left of the screen,by speeding up the countdown clock between enemy waves.
From the battle screen,there’s two main areas that you’ll be using a lot. The world map and your secret base. The world map is beautifully rendered and can be zoomed in to see the great amount of detail at the locations and cities scattered around Europe. The main campaign will alert you to missions and objectives in certain areas but there’s also the ability and choice to take on enemy factory locations and also to send agents on secret missions to extract information and bring home coin,through the worlds interwoven train network.
At the base location.Things obviously start off at the basics with just a few buildings and the main factory for the tower. As you complete battles and build up coin and parts however.You soon begin to build up enough profit and materials to build train stations,weapons factories and houses for your alliance members that wield income through taxes. Campaign objectives enable you to rescue and free specialists and scientists who will work for you,and create and manufacture new and more powerful inventions to use on the tower.
As you put more hours into this game,you’ll realise that steampunk tower is a mighty fine game that really excels more on the finer details than the base game mechanics of battle/build/upgrade that is sadly widely overused in many mobile games.
Visually and audibly,the steampunk type genre is always great to see and play along with. The main characters are colourful and well detailed and certainly each is pleasing to the eye,both good and bad ones.
The finer detail highlights come with those little extras that make it stand out.. the puff of smoke that rises from your battle tower,the sound of the chime from the tower clock and the little train coasting along the rail track on the world map,are delightful little additions.
Overall,this is a title that expels the boredom and stagnancy of many tower defence titles before it. The campaign is big and varied and wields a lot of depth and many hours of gameplay at a decent price of $10.
If there’s any downside to this game. I’d say that it can feel slow on progression and especially tower progression,requiring players to replay many locations and side missions in order to get the required parts for upgrades. Yes,it’s grindy and it can feel like a slow climb,but with gameplay hitting the addictive button each time,you really don’t mind making the time and effort in what I personally believe to be,Drageus games “jewel in the crown”
Definitely Recommended !
Thanks to Drageus Games for the code.
https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/steampunk-tower-2-switch/
