IMM Defense Reviews

Very unbalanced. Seems almost impossible to get past the first few levels.

I've seen a lot of bad TD games in my time, but this one is truly a new low. No clue what is going on, can't tell the guns apart, do clue what damage they do, or their range. I tried to upgrade a gun twice, no clue what the upgrade did the first time, was it worth spending 80 to upgrade a gun that had cost 60 in the first place? No clue. I know what it did the second time though, the gun vanished. What the heck? Nine thumbs down on this nightmare.

Did not expect too much for my couple of dollars, but was pleasantly surprised. The store site is particularly "busy" and tended to put me off - it must be a very late level setup. There is no tutorial and the help is bare bones, but after a couple of practice runs it all quickly falls into place. The game rewards good tactics as do most good Tower Defense games. The later levels get fairly hard very quickly. I would like to see a number of pieces of additional information, - the damage done by the various towers and the incremental effects of the upgrades. - some information on the hitpoints and vulnerabilities of the various enemies. - the ranges of the various towers when you are scrolling through the tower options for a particular site. None of these are game breakers and, notwithstanding, a good value for money game.

IMM Defense is a minimalist/neon tower defense with a few differentiators. While the game is ultimately a failure due to the poor quality technical implementation, there's some interesting aspects of it that I hope other, better developers will adopt. Unlike most TD's, which either give you a tiny handful of nodes, or practically free placement, this one hits somewhere inbetween with a generous selection of nodes to choose fromm which gives you freedom to decide the best placement strategy, and success or failure is all up to the strategy you employ... I'm all for games where the user agency is a determining factor. Not skill, reflexes, but tactical strategy. I've seen one of the reviews complained the game was too hard, but once I understood a little better how the game worked, I was able to formulate a placement strategy that won through. That's good game design, whether deliberate or not. But it also points out the biggest problem with this despite the weak delivery, and that is the developer didn't bother including tooltips or any kind of manual to explain what the towers do. WTF, right? Like, how are you supposed to work it out? And what do the upgrades do? Being obtuse on purpose is one of the things that irritates gamers, so let's not do that. Manual, tooltips, we don't need a lot but we need something. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2024 (and this was released not so far back in 2018), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? IMM Defense is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.