Hydraulic Empire Reviews

The sound effects and music glitch, high scores are not saved. Feels unfinished like a beta version. Graphics are fine, music is great. Looks like it has all it needs to be a great addition to the genre but the above mentioned breaks it for me.

I love the concept of a steam punk tower defense, however there are a couple things that really kinda ruined it for me. 1) The board is really small for how fast the enemy moves, and you don't have enough money to block them quick enough. 2) the graphics of the floor make it hard to see your cursor. And the border graphics tend to be too fancy for quickly understanding your status. 3) Although the idea of a "builder hero" is awesome - and I get the concept that you have to trade off your builder fighting with actually building - however you often need him to fight for too long to get something built. 4) You can only upgrade the tower once (or so it appeared), so once you choose "stronger" vs "range" - that's it, It's a great concept, however in my opinion it needs a little editing on the playability.

Game is very unbalanced, Easiest mode is extremely difficult (either that or the mode settings are not working). Been playing TD's for many years and this is the toughest easiest mode i have encountered overall. Works find in full screen..saw one reviewer beatching that it did not. Can't close dialogue boxes untill you do EXACTLY what they want. Annoying music has no seperate volume control. Can;t say about bugs or crashes as i am still only 8 campaigns into it I would wait to buy it till they give it some more polish

This is not a bad game, there are some substance and challenge, but it is a bit rough around the edges for a commercial game, and I think there are a number of better and more polished games in the crowded Tower Defense genre. The game production is quite ambitious and certainly above many mobile TD ports. but unfortunately it lacks polish in several areas. In particular when there are many enemies on screen the action become confuse and it is sometimes hard to place a tower where you want because there are always an enemy on the tile were you want to built hence the game display an enemy info box instead of the build pop-up just because you can't access the empty tile with your mouse pointer. Here a simple keyboard shorcut for building would have helped. Then there are occasional fram rate drops or even a few of CTDs (though not during action proper but rather when navigating through menu). Also annoying is the fact that the game doesn't properly save your highscore and on occasion I also had my progress reset to zero. The campaign map is not very convenient, either to navigate or to inform you on the exact map #ID and your progress so far, here many TDs do a much better job. Also the game lack a proper manual and a Towers and Ennemies cyclopedia. Besides these annoying issues, there is some challenges so it might be worthwhile on sale. Though I would recommend other TDs over this one

Early Access Review - Will update as more features are added. An absolute must buy for TD fans. Even if you not that in TD this is still worth a look. I did a first impressions / early access review video. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=479836216 Hydraulic Empire is a fantastic TD game. It uses some mechanics seen in other TD games. It also add some new mechanics and systems that make this an already really well round, fun and engaging TD. + Mob Interactions that I have not seen in previous TD's. It will keep you on your toes. + Great Map/Level design which makes you want to replay and try a diff set of towers/maze route. + RPG elements which reward replays of earlier missions without feeling like a grind. + Hero/Builder character keeps the gameplay engaging. No sit back and watch the towers kill mobs here. + Perk Tree for the Hero Builder. + A fresh unique take on persistent upgrades for towers. - A little rough around the edges. - Still more features to be added. (not neccisdarily a - but needs mentioning for those that want a complete game. - A little tough to begin with.

I love Tower Defense games, I own and have played dozens of them on PC/XBLA/iPad etc. I want to like this game but it is just not very good in its current state. It lacks a lot of (basic) features - Custom keybinds - Full screen windowed - Sound off by loss of focus - 16:10 support Then the HUD is just lackluster, the upgrade menu's provide little information. Yes you can figure it out easily but you shouldn't have too. It just shows how much polish (or lack thereoff) this game has gotten. And on top of that I've had several times that the mission just restarted out of nowhere after alt tabbing. Posted feedback on the forums but no reply still so I'm posting this review and I'm asking for a refund. Even with 75% discount I don't think this game deserves to be rewarded with my money.

This could have been a cool tower defense game, but as others have already mentioned, the balancing is way off. Some maps are literally impossible to solve unless you select the exact tower placement (and thus force the enemies on the specific path) that is required. No matter if you have ultra-upgraded towers or not, you simply will not win unless you get the path correct. While some may find this challenging, I found it tedious in the extreme - playing a level over and over. Note also that this is based on the "medium" difficulty setting. There are two settings higher than this. I doubt I will explore them. The other issue with this game is the glitches. After playing 3 or 4 rounds, the sound begins to skip and distort. This gets worse the longer you play, until after about 45 minutes the sound is painful to listen to. At this point your only choice is to close the game and then reload it. The same thing happens with the video - especially if you have lots of enemies on the screen at once. The frame rate will suddenly pause, and then when it resumes everything runs really fast to "catch up". Frustrating doesn't begin to describe the experience. (Note that this is with a 4-gig GTX 960 graphics card, which should be more than enough for a sprite-based tower defense game!) A final nit-pick I'd like to share is with the system used to upgrade the tower abilities, your starting money, etc: It is PAINFULLY slow. You get between 40 and 60 "coins" from each completed level, and those can be used to build little machines that will provide upgrades. But these upgrades are almost non-existent. 1.2% increased damage... 0.8% reduced purchase cost... That sort of thing. And the upgrades get expensive - fast! A level 2 upgrade is 60 coins. Level 3 is 80 coins. And so on... Each time you're getting a tiny, almost imperceptible improvement. To say that it's a grind to upgrade the towers has got to be the understatment of the year. Plus you have a limited number of squares available to build these upgrade machines, so you have no hope of upgrading everything. TL;DR: Unbalanced game play, glitchy sound and graphics, and a frustrating grind to obtain needed upgrades all add up to a lousy experience. I'd rather play Defence Grid: The Awakening, or DG2: Defence Grid 2, or even Tower Wars. Anything but this game. Don't waste your money. PS: I wrote this review quite a while ago and then waited to post it to be sure I wasn't just having a bad day. I've checked back several times and each time I looked over the text I agreed that yes, this is accurate. So today I decided to finally post my review.

A bad little Tower Defense game. The graphics are detailed and colourfull, but with annoying lacking of deeping and shadows; can not choose resolutions under 1072 px. While it runs, sounds and music degenerate in awkful noises, by a own software error. The mechanics is good, with a hero, 10 kinds of towers, upgrades and customizations. But are been awkfully implemented and gameplay ruins the fun: can not fit in full screen with 4:3 aspect ratio, sometimes crushes by abuse of graphic card even in medium quality, has few zoom option and a too slowly side displacement, hero is slow altought is needed to built every tower, is difficult to distinguish from the background and have problems to aiming, towers dont changes when upgrading, foes are too speedy, the rewards for kill them are poor. To complete it require patience and willpower; get 95% of achievements takes less of 20 hours in hard mode. Seems a failed attempt to emulate Tower Wars.

(Personal disclosure: I had this game before the whole thing and so was rather shocked about it all because I liked this game and was waiting for it to become more complete than when I first played it.) This is a TD game with a few customizable options, generally you know what you're getting fare with TD. But that isn't why I am recommending this title - [u]I am recommending it because the developer has impressed me.[/u] (Others, too, that a developer can turn themselves around!) Sure, the usual thing of a developer doubling-down with dishonesty happened, and in this case it was rather bad. Not as in banning everyone or deleting tons of threads bad (though some were deleted before it was noted that Valve and Steam Community Moderators can see EVERYTHING deleted) and the developer did play it fair in that regard afterwards. What happened was actually worse, pushing towards felony material. First it had started with review fraud by an account from the game's Greenlight submission page along with a known artist for the game. The artist immediately apologized and took down their reviews, conforming to both Valve's rules and consumer law regarding proper disclosure in review. They were thanked for their honesty along with having the problems review fraud could have given them explained. This was as much for their benefit as any other developers looking in on the situation. The lead developer was a different story. Insisting that they were the sole developer, nobody else despite credits and other developers being mentioned in the creation of Hydraulic Empire, the developer tried to distance themselves from the account from the Greenlight submission page (royalmage7). Now in turn the royalmage7 account was offering the idea that they weren't even connected to the developer. "So first off I do not work for the dev, I just wanted to help him out. I made post like that in order to make him look better (bigger studio)." They had changed their reviews to preserve them, claiming that they were a moderator once upon a time and no longer had ties to the developer. [u]The problem was that royalmage7 was actually the developer trying to take the heat off of themselves.[/u] They may not have understood fully what they were doing, but they tried to cover up review fraud (which usually faces many thousands USD in fines depending upon state and even federal laws) by claiming misrepresentation fraud to make people think the company was larger to entice buyers (which is a felony in most states and even on a federal level IIRC). The developer had to be saved from themselves and shown why this was bad before it got even worse. A Google Cache result exposing their alt account was shown, upon which the developer removed all fraudulent reviews and issued an apology. Yeah, it had to get to that point, I did get a bit snarly at the continued lies (which was far better than the alternatives), but now that the developer dropped the whole thing and has apologized and [u]has gone one unasked-for step beyond in trying to resolve anyone hurt by this[/u], I'll be one of if not the first to be right there behind the developer if they continue doing things right. The fraud, both counts of it, have been remedied by the actions of the developer. Since the apology the developer has gone back to fix bugs, so the title has not been dropped. It is just waiting for more input - input that I think this developer deserves now that they are doing things right. Thank you for doing the right thing. It wasn't pretty, but you now stand as an example of how someone can clean up their act to preserve their indie development career. :) Some info links about this: FTC Guidelines - as Valve is a US company they must conform to US law (along with the State of Washington's state laws), which requires proper disclosure in review, though Valve usually squishes most developers reviewing their own games - NOTE: THIS MAY BE DIFFERENT IN YOUR JURISDICTION AND COMPLETELY ILLEGAL EVEN WITH DISCLOSURE, DO NOT RISK IT: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking Dev Apology: http://steamcommunity.com/games/381220/announcements/detail/2641773114861818516 A post explaining why the developer dove from frying pan into fire by defending one kind of fraud with another: http://steamcommunity.com/app/381220/discussions/0/2119355556477136107/#c2119355556479032398 SidAlpha's report in review: https://youtu.be/n9nFXr76W9Q

Update: A developer responded to my review and updated the game based on the feedback. I have not had time to play through it again, but I appreciate their effort. If you read the original review below and are on the fence about Hydraulic Empire, you might consider giving it a chance. My intention was not to be the bad review that killed their business; I was genuinely frustrated at the time. I don't know if it's better, but they seem to be honestly trying, which is commendable. Original review follows: Well, I just uninstalled this one, having decided it was no longer worth the effort. Another good example of a game with an interesting concept but poor execution. Also, a good example of why you should always check the global achievement stats: less than 1.5% of people who own this game even finished it. I am starting to get the impression that most reviewers just sample games and base their reviews on a fun initial impression, imagining the possibilities - they do not complete the games and they do not have a complete picture of what they are talking about. Would you trust someone who read a book halfway through and just told you their general impressions? Many games just end up becoming repetitive and run out of ideas about halfway through. At that point you get the sense the developers are working to fill time and hard drive space. Guess which type of game Hydraulic Empire is. That's right! Hydraulic Empire is a tower defense game but it's also a puzzle game in that many of the levels are only completeable if you build out a path the correct way. No amount of upgrading or leveling towers will save you if you have not made the path correctly. So although it may seem like you have a lot of options to play with, there is usually one strategy you must take to beat certain levels. By far the easier levels are those in which you don't have to think too much about your path building. Some may call it poor game design, others may call it having nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon. You can build upgrades for both your overall game and for individual towers - the difference being that the individual tower upgrades give higher stat bonuses, that is, they give not completely useless stat bonuses. This is all done on two grids (one for overall, one for towers) and so there are a limited number of slots for each upgrade. The overall upgrades are generally so weak that you would need to create 3 - 6 fully upgraded attack (or speed or range or whatever) upgrades to see a noticeable difference. So for about halfway through the game as you are collecting gems (cogs?) to be able to buy these upgrades you get the impression that the upgrades aren't really doing much, and by the end of the game you simply think about how much worse you would be losing had you not had a fully upgraded grid. This game plays that much with the margins of those power ups and will not let you expand once you fill up your grid that for some there will most likely be no way to complete the game. After playing through what I presumed was the last level on Normal difficulty something like 20 times, I decided I was one of those people because there are other things to do on a Saturday afternoon. Oh you also have a robot guy with special abilities, who shoots at enemies, and can power up your towers. He too has a max level cap that seems frustratingly low (25) at the end of the game. Why not give the option for a player who is having difficulty completing the game grind his way through so he can feel like all those little doggie hoops he was jumping through were not for naught? No, the developers decided that the last hoop would be a ring of fire and no matter how many times you try to leap through it your fur and skin will become singed and burned off in small bits every time until you have neither hair nor patience left.