Dead Soul TowerDefense:Shadow Labyrinth Steam Charts & Stats

I played the demo for somewhere between 4-8 hours and liked it enough to buy the full game. I uninstalled the demo and forgot to see how much time I'd played it. I'm writing a review because the game currently doesnt have any reviews, somehow. Look, the game's base is solid for a tower defense, but it's got some UI polish it needs to do, like adding keyboard controls for things in the menus and adding the ability to configure these in the options. Currently, the sound effects audio controls just dont work. So the game fires up at max volume and when the units launch their special attacks, you get a loud, poorly tuned noise, and it sounds bad and you cant do anything about it. Good: Good tower defense gameplay. You can upgrade individual towers (or units). It has some of the standard TD things like armor, flying enemies (and units that cant hit flying units, while others can), poison, chilling effects (slowing enemies down). You can maze in later maps and the mazing units are super cheap. There is an endless mode which you can use to see how units really shine and just vibe to the game. Good/Bad: It's grindy. There's a meta upgrade skill tree (pictured in the store page). Most of its upgrades are incrementally quite small. The prices seem expensive, but when I played the demo and got to like endless mode, I was earning more than enough meta currency to buy upgrades frequently. Meta currencies can be rapidly earned by unlocking acheivements. Just playing the first map succesfully and upgrading a couple of units will give you some starting meta currency to buy some upgrades. So its not as bad as it seems. I list this as either good or bad because some people like grindy games and some dont. The reason I think this is a plus is because this makes it a Tower Defense game that isn't a puzzle with only one correct solution. You can grind a little bit and repeat stuff to overcome obstacle maps. Also means that if you lose, you usually still get something out of it. Bad: Sound effects from unit attacks kinda sucked. One of the attacks just sounded like static. I desperately wanted to mute them but because it wouldnt work, I just turned the volume on my computer all the way off. There are still random locations where internationalization hasn't been done so if, like me, you have your computer set to english, you'll have no idea what it said because it's in whatever the developer's native language is. Most of the UI and the intro story dialogue is in english so its generally fine, but still immersion breaking. It's grindy and may be tuned around grinding. I remember my first impression, after you beat the first map and unlock 2 more - one of them I was pretty sure you were meant to come back to way later with some upgrades. But that was also the demo with only like 3 tower types available. Maybe that's different now, because the full game gives you a variety of units tailored to defeating different enemies. Upon buying the full game, I reset my save game, because I forgot if there was story/what the story was. After beating the first map and getting to the second map that I'm positive you are supposed to go to, I lost because I didnt tech enough anti-armor stuff. But maybe you're also supposed to upgrade your meta progression a bit. It can work either way. So it's grindy and you're going to need to replay content a fair amount in order to get the right builds. If you are more casual and replaying content is bad to you, this is probably not a game you want to play. The story. If you want the game to have a lot of story, look elsewhere. There is an opening sequence which is pretty grimdark (almost hilariously so), but I'm expecting that to be it, with no more story until the very end of the game. There are story heavy TDs out there, but this isnt one of them. But I dont really think that hurts the game much. People usually dont play TDs for the story, they play them to make ridiculous death traps. Which is something you definitely can do in this game. In summary, based mainly on my time with the demo, I give this game a recommendation. It has polish issues that will hopefully be ironed out with bug fixes, but the game was still fun regardless.