Aegis Defenders Reviews

[h1]TL:DR:[/h1] Really solid title which has both side scrolling adventure and tower defense type gameplay. Both styles work together nicely for a uniquely fun experience. The artwork is beautiful, the audio is excellent, and gameplay is actually fun. There is also a story involved for those who enjoy a narrative. Though a bit pricey at $20, I recommend. [h1]First Impression Gameplay[/h1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vibF_TBhG2k [h1]Full Review[/h1] I've been playing this for only a short time at this point, and I'm already really enjoying it. Aegis Defenders incorporates side scrolling adventure with tower dense type gameplay. I know that might sound a little weird, but it works really well. Basically, you adventure through a level while fighting enemies and collecting resources as you make it to the end. The end of a level has an objective, where your characters can utilize deployables to help fight off oncoming waves of enemies. The art-style is beautiful, and I really find the color palate and aesthetics pleasing to the eye. Enemies are interesting, the characters are well defined, and the enlarged art of characters during cutscenes add to the flow of the story. Environments are well crafted and have a very artifact hunter vibe. Controls are responsive and can be remapped. The game supports controller input, and I would recommend using one (even though I'm an avid mouse and keyboard guy myself). Each character has an offensive ability, defensive ability, deployable ability, and the ability to jump. Audio was pretty good overall. Ambient noises added to the atmosphere, soundtrack was great, and I even enjoyed the little grunts characters would make during dialogue on occasion. While there is narrative, I did not come across any voice acting. Gameplay is fun and interesting. Levels consist of two stages: typical side scrolling adventure/platforming, and a tower defense setup at the end (which is still in side scrolling format). Each character can put down unique deployables to help defeat oncoming waves of enemies. Before each wave starts, you are given a short opportunity to collect more resources and build more stuff before the next stronger wave approaches. At the end of each level, you can spend acquired gems to purchase upgrades to your deployables. All in all, I think this is a solid game. I did not experience any crashes, glitches, or other technical difficulties. The price is a bit steep, but at the moment I feel it is worth it. I'll be playing more, and if my opinion on that changes, I'll update this review.

I did not enjoy a single second of this game, my biggest issue is in tower defence you build and then watch things play out, either enjoying your victorious correct choices or getting dumped on and learning from mistakes. Here you run around gathering resources and worrying how other characters doing (played single player mode) are they "dead"? is the turret placement working? im sure in later stages you will also get swarmed by enemies so it becomes "fun", but not for me. Also not finding the fourth artifact and not getting the needed resources is a marvelous design decision. The platforming feels like a chore and out of place. Now that i think about it almost every aspect of the game is annoying and not fun. But hey, you might like it.

Pretty good! Keyboard controls were a little awkward, but other than that It's a good time. Really nice art direction for people who like pixel art and full-size character portraits. The characters all play differently, but some of their builds are more powerful than others, and once you figure that out, you can just stack them for easy wins. A good number of difficulty levels helps that though. And a pretty good orchestral soundtrack too.

Another sad case of "I wanted to love this game so badly". Everything from it's beautiful art design to it's obvious influences from Nausicaa were on point. Sadly like many of the other less than enthusiastic reviews will mention, a lot of the difficulty curve comes from the game pretty much being built for co op. That wasn't actually my problem though. My problem was from the co-op itself. Apparently since march 2018 (1 month from game release) it was reported that in multiplayer the game would randomly freeze every 20 minutes or so and that the problem also existed on the console version. There was no reply to be had from the devs or anyone and as such, the problem still exists. I want to say "i hope they fix it soon so that i don't have to keep restarting chunks of the game over" but if it's been a year and they couldn't be bothered to offer a fix or even reply. At least the problem was frequent enough to make it an easy refund. Which honestly saddens me because it was a lot of fun and the gf and I were getting really excited about the game, but losing progress every 20 minutes is just too much.

About 13 hours of the game mostly kicking my butt on NORMAL, yes the game is difficult but it isn't impossible... haven't checked the other difficulties but NORMAL IS STANDARD SO SHUSH. As you play you get more options of "defenses" you wish to use, good upgrades, and (using Clu to kick every foe into oblivion) you can have amazing setups that can stop a horde dead in their tracks. The game can get easy sometimes in the later stages for different reasons, game design, preparing with "infinite resources" before you even start the prepare time, or decently difficult because limited resources or always on the move so setup doesn't have a lasting effect. I didn't have many issues with the game, controls were good (hand got tired from constant gaming though), control scheme slightly weird but you pick up on it fast. I also didn't run into many bugs, maybe an enemy got stuck due to it aggroing or actually getting stuck but nothing major to affect my enjoyment of the game. Art is good, can't say much about the music because I was to busy trying to murder everything, (DONT TOUCH MY STUFF!) Actual combat outside of the tower defense is, okay (nothing amazing), you either spam range attacks or go Shovel Knight style. Puzzles were unique and interesting, took me a bit to figure some of them out because I'm oblivious to obvious things. Games feels short but again, kicked my ass for 13 hours on Normal, lasted longer than CUPHEAD, and I got the other difficulties to put me in my place. Not a bad game overall, teleporters are annoying though lol. I definitely recommend this game to those who like an interesting tower defense game and maybe play it co-op because it seems its easier than, SWITCH FIRE LASER, SWITCH BUILD SENTRY, SWITCH FIRE LASER 2, SWITCH CLU ARROW BARRAGE (you get the point). Even though ive beaten this game by myself, I'll definitely play it again on a higher difficulty and drag one of my friends who has no idea whats going on to assist me. Anyhow, if you buy this game then great, enjoy!

I had a decent amount of fun with this game. However, I do not recommend it, due to some incredibly frustrating oversights & design decisions. [h1] Finicky Progression:[/h1] During various dialogue segments between missions, the player is offered choices of dialogue. Picking the 'best' choice awards the player 3 RP, used for unlocking upgrades. The other 2 choices award 2, or 1 RP, respectively. Replaying the mission does not trigger these dialogues a second time, so if you pick the wrong choice (of which there is no way to know without a guide), you lose out on these RP permanently. It is a small amount overall, but it bothered me a lot to know that I missed these points, and there was no way to get them, besides replaying the entire game, because of: [h1] Autosave[/h1] The game autosaves. So, if you don't keep backup saves, say goodbye to your opportunity to do various things FOREVER. For example, there is a set of bonus missions, wherein the player is tasked with completing the level. As an optional bonus objective, the player can collect relics from the level. However, these bonus missions can only be completed a SINGLE TIME. So, if you fail to collect all the relics in the mission, and (accidentally) reach the missions end, the game instantly autosaves, and you can never go back and try it again, and collect these relics, unless you have a backup save file. Why is this a thing? Up until the moment you complete the mission, you can retry it infinite times, so the autosave immediately afterwards is quite punishing. [h1]Time pressure[/h1] Each level generally follows the same format: Puzzle platforming section, followed by a tower defence section. Each tower defence section also generally follows the same format: 60 second build phase, and then an attack phase which lasts until all enemies are defeated. The 60 second time limit already feels extremely strict, even in single player, where pausing is enabled, but it's workable, mostly. ... Except in some of the later levels, there is no longer a 60 second build phase, and the levels are so incredibly hectic, I felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack from the sheer amount of stuff happening every second. managing to get stuff done in 60 seconds was already hard, and not having it I felt impotent. Why the sudden change? It's a completely different game when you have a period of safety to move, think, build, and plan, than to not have it. The first level without a build phase was a gimmick. The second level overstayed it's welcome. The third level, I gave up. ----- Overall, this is a fun game, but it kinda wrings you around, by teaching you how to play at the start, and then suddenly changing the formula midway through to something much more hectic and stressful. Up until act 5 (with the exception of 1 level), I recommend this game. After that point, I do not recommend it. In some alternate reality where this game gets updated again, I would strongly appreciate an option or difficulty setting to remove the timer entirely, as well as modify the few levels that remove the build phase to add it back in.

A very beatiful game with a mix of platformer and TD gameplay. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1421688770 I like very much how devs made this game. Everything is on high level. Graphics is awesome, music is cool. I liked all parts of performance. There is a nice storytelling with different characters. If it was a pure TD game, I would be happy, but it is mainly a platformer game. The game has 2 main gameplays. In the first part you play it as a usual platformer game: move, jump, attack, find secrets and etc. In the second part, you need to defend "the target" from enemies. It's kinda a defense part. You need to place towers, mines and etc. Not bad, but nothing spectacular. The game is designed to play with 2 players with local co-op. Yes, you can swap character at any times, but it is much better to play with a mate. I very liked performance of the game, but I am not big fan of platformer games. If you are in it, take it. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1421688672 Pros - Very beaftufuil graphics - Nice mix of platformer and TD gameplay - Nice music and sound effects - There is a story Cons - It's not a great platformer game and it lacks of TD features. - Sometimes is annoying to play solo. Much better to play with a mate. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1421688722 [h1]Resume[/h1] A very beautiful platforomer game with a few TD elements. It is designed to play with 2 players. So, you have a mate, I can recommend it for a full price. If you are going to play it alone, take it with at least 50% discount

This is COOP game. DO NOT BUY IT if you play alone. It say "single player" in shop and while you CAN play it alone the game mechanics is completely build around playing coop. It's like Thrine (but way worse) required switching between two classes with unique abilities while completing level. And at the end of level it become tower defense, where inactive class behaive really poor. Another issue is that game completely ignore MOUSE. I'd really love to see "Mouse support" feature so that PC users like me can see and immediately skip such games. I don't really want to make my review negative, but there is no possibility to make it neutral and I definetely want to warn about two points above.

TL;DR Only buy if you're really digging the TD part. For metroidvania, buy Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight or join the endless waiting game for Chasm.. Graphics & Sound are top notch but this isn't anything like a "Metroidvania" with tower defense. It feels like a small adventure part with TD to close each level. Like 20% "adventure" (on a very linear path) and 80% (hectic) TD in the end. I hoped for more adventure with TD thrown in there. Like medium optional. But I was fighting of monsters at one side, watching grandpa standing around doing nothing on the other beeing overrun. Wasn't that much fun (for me) :(

I loved this game at first. It had so much potential! But it really doesn't execute the tower defense angle well. Switching between characters and micro managing them is tedious. I played quite a while and still only had 2 characters with 1 tower each. There really isn't much strategy. The levels are either super easy or super hard. The difficulty usualy comes from not having enough time to collect resources and build between each wave, especially when you have to switch between characters and then switch their weapons to the ones required to mine resources and then switch them back and position them where you want after the wave has already started. The final straw was the fact that you build up a defense based on the level shape, and then in late waves the level suddenly changes and the towers you built become useless, forcing you to restart and build in specific locations based on how the level will change. I hate when tower defense games require foreknowledge of the waves in order to beat them. That's just repitition and memorization, not strategy.