What The Fortress!? Reviews

Early days, but enjoying the ride. Interesting upgradeable towers, mazing, buffs and enemies. Has a leaderboard, which is good at keeping you focused. I like the fact that the opening of new gates and a limited number of road tiles makes you think ahead. Could turn into something really impressive!

This is a sandbox game, you build the maze. Your maze will be very limited in shape / size because the enemy can attack and kill your towers from over 10 tiles away. You are unable to know where to place your towers or how to build your maze until after you lose as the game does not explain or display these mechanics. Once you "figure it out" there is not a lot of variation or replayability. If you are looking for a balanced game, this is not it. There is gold generation and over 100% damage / speed upgrades to farm in the tech tree. Screen resolution issues. UI feels very bad to interact with.

Great game overall! Worth the price. Pros: - Wide variety of interesting towers. (So far the teleport tower + booster tower combo is my favourite, it makes insane money, but it can backfire as well) - The road system is quite enjoyable, you really have to make good decisions how you create your maze - Leaderboards are great - There are some very hard enemies with cool behaviours (dragons, tanks, bosses) Cons: - The tutorial is not the best, you have to play around a while to understand everything - The quests / missions are boring

I will admit, I an not much of a fan of games where towers can take damage, but my issues go far beyond this one mechanic. That is not to say that monsters that can out-range my best towers didn't, in the end, result in my finally giving up. The game looks cute, I will give it that, and the music is nice. There is a robust strategic upgrade menu, but that is about the end of the good stuff. The towers upgrade twice, with no options or choices. There does seem to be a nice variety of them, but anything with a short range is useless as they die way too fast. In my case, this was the plant tower, which seemed decent, but far too fragile. In addition the maze making portion of the game is harsh. I seem to have maxed out how many points I can put into tiles at 225, which really isn't enough to do anything interesting once all four portals are open. There are damaging tiles, which don't take damage, but they cost five, which is a lot when you are struggling to reach the path from four separate portals to your base. And of course one of my pet peeves, no fluff. There seems to be a nice variety of critters, but no story to explain them, or why they are attacking you, or anything. It feels like a game that could have been good, given another hundred or so hours of development. Levels that you can beat, a developing story, a more robust tower upgrade system, and some tactical attacks would go a long to making this a really good game. As is, I got it on sale, and it was still not worth it. Two thumbs down.

This had some promise but you can't turn off the music which is a major, enormous, huge, no no to me. There's no way to speed the game up that I saw, that's another red flag. The biggest issue I found though as that you have to lay down tiles and create your own path for the enemies to follow which is great, very traditional. However, that's usually achieved the other way around - using towers to create a maze. In this instance, you have no way that I could see to know how many rounds there are going to be, and no way to predict which gates are going to open up. Then you reach a tile limit. You can buy more in the tech tree, at completely and utterly random points by the way, not in a tile section of the tree. Only you can't delete used tiles, or replace expensive ones with cheaper ones. So when it tells you the fourth gate has opened and you haven't already connected it because you had no way to know it was going to open, you're not then able to delete tiles and reconfigure your maze, or lay new tiles. The game just stops at that point, you can't recover from it. Enemies can attack your towers, and there's no way to repair that I could see and no counter to it other than having enough damage to kill them before they kill your tower. I would absolutely revisit this game if I see that they've completely revamped it and honestly, done some testing which I can only conclude they didn't do much of because it seems like they've built lots of some bits of the game but not had outside people play it.