Tower Dominion Steam Charts & Stats

The RNG aspect is too much, you have no choices to create a great defense, only what appears. If you love RNG then this is your tower defense. But there is zero ability to defend your base how you would think or want to do, its all about map aspects, map pieces and random cards you get. It was fun for a while to get unlocks, but you realize most of the characters don't offer any offense which means you lag behind on waves 20+. Also there are no ECON buildings besides the map ones after 14 hours, how can I play the game with barely above 100 resources per round for 1-38 rounds. Overall, the enemies outpace you quickly due to the map expansion being wildly high allowing more branches, and the fact that econ is practically impossible to ramp up or even supplement with most "heroes". Pure RNG.

Cool game. Game feels very polished, cohesive and all around good experience. But it offers only single random scenarios for 17 dollars. This game in my opinion needs more choice or more persistent progression. I would suggest adding more build-defining doctrines (buffs) during scenarios or a multi-scenario 'run' with some minor run-persistent progression. It doesn't really nail the feeling that I want to try something just because I got a cool buff for it. still a banger tho.

Interesting concept, but winning/losing is too heavily influenced by RNG. There are a small handful of truly useful doctrines and weapons, but the number of low value choices means you rarely come across the choices you want. You often find yourself quickly outpaced by the enemy simply because you have no more effective weapons to put down, or perhaps you never encountered incremental buff doctrines like "+0.5% damage per reroll". Perhaps you are playing as the Iron Dragoons, whose build is centred around building a powerful HQ - but the game never gave you HQ-buffing doctrines, thus hurting your HQ's damage output severely later in the game. The lack of manual targeting priority means certain towers, such as those capable of detecting camo enemies, may end up ignoring them completely in favour of targeting other enemies instead. For example, the sniper tower has camo detection without any upgrades, but its default targeting priority is "Full HP" and "Closest to HQ", meaning it will often swap between tanky enemies that it can never deal any significant damage against by itself. Camo enemies will slip through your defences. The game affords you no opportunity to observe whether you are handling the enemy waves well enough to save up money for a few rounds. One round you handily defeat all the enemies long before they come anywhere close to your HQ. Next wave, you get absolutely wrecked. There is no gradual difficulty increase which you can prepare for, so you better hope RNG gives you the right tile piece, weapons, or doctrines. And that's if you even have enough money for that - I often lose at wave 30+, a few waves before the final wave at 35, with just the default +100 money per round. On the rare occasion that you manage to beat the final wave and enter endless mode, the framerate will happily fall from your monitor's refresh rate (160fps in my case) to a cinematic 30fps after wave 50 or so. And I've got a fairly high-end PC. The audio is a bit funky. Depending on which direction you're facing, gunfire and explosions on the left side of the screen will be heard on the right audio channel and vice versa, almost as if the devs forgot to also pan the audio when panning the camera. Not a huge problem, just find the one direction where the spatial audio matches the visuals and stay there. It's an okay game, but it needs major balancing changes. You don't play the next round thinking "I wonder what build I can try next", you are thinking "I hope I get so and so starting tiles and xyz weapons/doctrines"

Shorter than most TD's, with heavy RNG gating higher difficulties Lacks endgame progression, as all unlocks and achievements can be done on base difficulty For some reason, even though each tower can track its performance per wave, it doesn't have any tools to track your overall, so you end up clicking each one by one If the devs do future additions towards endgame, smoothing the difficulty/RNG curve, and giving you actual macro tools like other games of its kind, I'd recommend it Until then, stay clear, or pick up during a discount if the aesthetic appeals to you

Tower Dominion has good graphics and standard tower defense game modes. The different commanders are a nice addition. However, I find it lacks long-term motivation.

This is a good Tower Defense game with one major, glaring flaw that really curbed my enjoyment of the game: lack of player agency. What I mean by that is that is that the player is only given full control of the faction, leader, and difficulty to start a run, and then most everything else is determined by the RNG. You get to place towers, but your choice of towers is included in one of three item bundles after each wave. Those bundles also include specific tower upgrades and general upgrades. In a lot of cases, your choice of upgrades will make some of those items complete trash you have to avoid. I'll give some examples of this in action. There's a faction with an HQ building with the ability to build tons of guns on it. This super platform of guns can be better than a lot of towers if you synergize upgrades with it. There's an upgrade that says "As long as you build only one sniper tower, your HQ gets a big range and damage buff." Perfect synergy, right? Well, first off, you need to get that upgrade to drop. You also then can't build more than one sniper tower, so taking any item bundles with sniper towers or their upgrades are worthless. Oh, and also sniper towers are one of the few early game reliable buildings against camouflaged enemies. So, you better plan on having other towers that can detect those in case you get camo enemies (which are also determined by the RNG, and you're only given a few waves of notice beforehand). One of the other most reliable detecting towers uses a different resource that also is needed to re-roll terrain pieces (again, terrain is determined by RNG). Oh, and that different resource you don't even generate natively as that faction, so you better hope you get some recon drops or economy upgrades via the RNG each wave. You could also hope for a neutral building that provide detecting to adjacent towers, but again, if it even shows up and where it's located is determined by, you guessed it, the RNG. The game is full of design decisions like this that just serve to throw the player curveballs or make you feel that you "picked the wrong upgrades" for that run. It seems like half my runs of going for "condense all battlefronts into one chokepoint" turns into getting nothing but the number of battlefront buffs that become extremely watered down in that scenario and getting those enemies that get stronger the fewer battlefields you get. What all this RNG eventually does is it, somewhat ironically, forces the player to play each run mostly the same (especially at higher difficulties): to not go all-in on one strategy or building unless you already have all the upgrades for it, make sure you've got enough towers to handle shields, camouflage, and air enemies depending on what enemies are chosen. Don't lock yourself into one battlefront unless you've already got one super defensible choke point, make sure to not close off other entry points unless you know your other pathways can handle the increased traffic, etc. I want the freedom to try out some crazy placements and strategies and not be hamstrung by the RNG. I want to try out building nothing but sturdy bunkers and see if their overlapping proximity bonuses could hold back an apocalyptic tide. I want to see if I could do nothing but barricades and strike teams with no offensive towers at all and be successful. Maybe nothing but trenches and grenadiers running around in some crazy WW1 re-enactment? This game does not allow for that - experimentation is kept to the bare minimum, and success at higher difficulties is always about being able to min/max what you're given. There's one character you can only unlock by building 3 of the same Tier 3 tower - the Howitzer. Across 20 hours of runs at all difficulties, I've never had a run where building 3 Howitzers was even an option. It would be such a simple fix too - just allow the player to choose a couple towers that they'll always have at their disposal. Or allow re-rolls on item bundles and have a separate resource for re-rolls, don't use the same resource for both re-rolls and tower building/upgrades. It's a shame because there is a lot of good stuff in here and for the most part is an enjoyable TD game. If Steam had a sideways thumbs option, I'd give it that. If you find the challenge of a TD game in being able to flex and adapt to whatever the RNG gives you, then definitely pick this game up. If you want the ability to test out certain strategies, experiment, and plan beforehand, this is not the game for you.

--tl;dr This feels like an unfinished product. The strategy is shallow, and the lack of weighted chance rolls is getting in the way of the gameplay. --In depth: --Starting positions on difficulty 4 and above will force you to merge what the game calls "battlefronts." You can have only 4 of these, and merging them makes some enemies stronger, and a few important cards you can get weaker. So the designer intent seems to be to NOT merge them. --Between every round, you get 3 pairs of cards to choose from. these can be towers, or passive buffs. This is where the lack of weighted chance comes in because you can spend many rounds not rolling a single tower, so your firepower can't match the increasing number of enemies that spawn per wave. Or you could roll the highest tier tower in your first round, which you won't be able to build until late game, so one of your choices is invalid. --Another issue that isn't related to weighted chance, certain "buff" cards are mathematically inefficient and make your run weaker if you pick them. This seems like a big oversight. There are no strategies that would make them work. My go to example would be the one that makes building 10% cheaper, but upgrading 10% more expensive. Your most basic tower in this game is a Mirador, and even on that basic, cheapest tower in the game, the math instantly makes you spend more resources to get them fully running, than if you simply don't pick that "buff" card. This is not the only case. --The game also does a very bad job of teaching you how to play it. Your previous TD experience of course helps, but there are mechanics at play here which are a bit different. Turrets come with pre-set target priority that you can't change, and it causes them to ignore dangerous enemies far too often, ending your run, even though you have more than enough firepower to deal with those enemies. Another example is that they've added a tooltip at the top right part of the screen which explains the difference between battlefronts and entrances, and it tells you that enemies get distributed equally between the available entrance points. This proves completely untrue in practice. --The main menu comes with a button that invites you to join a discussion about the game on their official discord. However, I have never seen a dev chime in, and all channels have long ago devolved into people describing their fave strats, or if someone complains about a feature, there's regular members who keep showing up with comments that can be summed up as the "git gud" meme. --In summary: I think the devs have put in a lot of work and love into this TD. It has potential, and I did have some fun with it, but the gameplay is at odds with itself. At the time of writing this review, you will notice I have 353 hours on record. This is because I was very thorough in trying to understand game mechanics and trying out MANY different strategies. But knowing what I do now, I would not play the game in its current state. That said, it may appeal to a more casual audience, which it seems to be aimed at. And I WAS looking for a casual experience, but the design flaws bother me too much and I will not be giving it any more of my time unless I see some key problems resolved in patch notes.

Great TD game with multiple strategies, could use coop multiplayer but thats it

It's an engaging tower defense game with a good amount of content and interesting synergies and strategies to explore. However, the final waves in almost every situation are terribly unbalanced. Often the previous waves are cleared easily, only to be rapidly wiped out by the final wave. This makes the game feel meaningless to play, as only a lot of luck will see you through the last wave. The balance needs to be addressed.

I unlocked 100% of the achievements, beating the game with every Hero on the hardest difficulty. Overall I enjoy this game but I feel its rather short and bland. At 75 hours I've seen and done everything there is to do and I wish there was more content. This game, at this time, is not at its potential and needs either more game modes or a deeper end game. My other issue is all hero's kinda feel meaningless to me. Sure, the hero's each have a unique ability but it feels so watered down that it doesn't matter what hero I play... I wish the factions and hero's felt more unique, I really don't have any preference to playing a particular faction. I don't change the way I play for any hero or faction making it kind of boring....I hope they fix this. This is a good tower defense game but lacks the polish to be great.