Only about an hour in, the controlling heroes portion of the game turned me off. :(
I still have it installed but haven’t gone back.
You are in for such a treat! Have fun!
I agree that it’s quite tedious to click the hero, in all the mayhem with all the towers around. I got over it, but I recall being pretty pissed early on with that mechanic as well.
I finished the campaign this week, but I’m still grinding to see what it takes to fully outfit 4 heroes and it’s quite the grind. It’s a bit sloppy port to leave so much grindy-grind in when you take out the online store. They should have tweaked it to grind 10x faster so I’d want to try different heroes.
Honestly, I have zero interest in grinding any additional heroes. It just takes too long - unlike Kingdom Rush where I relished getting a new hero and leveling it up.
Pointless brief aesthetic defense:
Is not ugly to me. I find it dark and gritty, but more important, rational. A trap may spike some monster and that produce some blood, and these pixels of blood would move a exact the same speed the P=M*V would mandate. Everything is clear (Except the cannons, that kind of lood goofy). The things look like how they should look.
I find the design is actually right for the game.
If it had a more modern / more detailed look with the same style I’d be OK with it. It’s just a little too low detail for my tastes.
Not sure how tower defensey this one is. Anyone tried it?
So I’m done with Last Hope. Here is my formal review I just posted on Steam:
This game had a lot going for it. The first 5-10 hours, it was a fairly enjoyable Tower Defense game. As you are leveling, and buying new things, everything feels OK. Challenging levels, many different variants of levels including several “arenas” where you can try your luck on a single map where other variables will change.
The story is pretty decent as far as games go. They aren’t going to win any Pulitzer prizes, but it’s serviceable and progresses the game.
Towers, the heart & sole of Tower Defense, come in many varieties, but you’ll find yourself using such a low number of these, because of the upgrade costs, that all the spots they give you maps will go empty.
Pathing is a big problem in this game. You aren’t told the paths that enemies will take, and you will constantly be starting over levels because of a new path that the zombies will take around your defenses. I hate games where I have to play several times just to memorize the paths. So many TD games give you the paths they will take with a simple key that I’m surprised they didn’t include this. I guess they consider this a game mechanic. Oh, and levels will change on you from one try to the next.
Where the game falls apart is the end-game and the leveling mechanic for the heroes. It’s quite obvious this game started out as a Free / low cost with a store to buy yourself credits for additional $$. The problem is when they ported this to Steam, while they removed the store, they didn’t adjust any of the exponential cost / experience required for leveling heroes.
So I went through all levels on Normal, then again on Hard, and I’ve done about 15 levels on nightmare. I have 2 heroes leveled all the way to 25, and two more that are level 23.
I just don’t see the point of continuing. I’m close to getting to level 25, but the repetition is absolutely killing me. It’s not fun.
With the upgrade paths for both towers and heroes, you can just grind yourself through the game. You don’t have to try any new strategy, you just need to level up your hero and towers. This is a flaw IMO because lack of repeatability means I’m not sure I’m doing good or not. Also, it’s impossible to give any specific advice to people because of the variation of heroes and towers with the leveling mechanic means that you and someone else will not have the same things, so any advice on levels is just not going to work.
Another negative is the implementation of the endless levels - if I could pick a game with the absolute worst endless mode, Last Hope would be that game. Every 5 levels the game wipes half your towers. It’s absolutely not recoverable from and the randomness of it really is super frustrating - I never did play any more levels after the first few forays.
If this game is on sale for $1.99 or cheaper during a steam sale, go for it, but don’t get hung up on the hero leveling or upgrading towers. Just pick a few towers (poison, sniper, farmer & air defense) and that’s all you really need.
That looks pretty dire, @amandachen. The word “fuss” in the title and the word “hobo” in the description, and both preceded by the adjective “space”?
-Tom
Last Hope Tower Defense is a Weeklong deal at Steam:
I gave Last Hope a try. I should have listened to @Tman and passed on it, but was searching for another Tower Defense to scratch the itch . I found it really grindy. They need to ramp up the money and xp pretty significantly as you progress so that you can try out things without taking hours to earn enough to get there.
Enjoyed Dungeon Warfare, so thanks to this thread for that. I had skipped it a couple times.
Back to searching for another one…
Available:
I gave it a try and after 38 minutes asked for a refund. I feel like it is way to much Shmup type gameplay than TD (IMHO).
I am not good at the Shmup portion nor do I enjoy it.
Looks like a very solid tower defense game, even if it does kind of look like a phone game.
Anyone tried this? I’ve got some trading card money in my Steam wallet, so I might give it a go in the next couple of days.
I just purchased Hypernova but won’t be able to get to it until this weekend.
The description sounds interesting, talking about settlement building and a tech tree, but the video makes it look like just another tower defense, nothing that makes it stand out.
Just a random thank you for this thread - both this and Brian’s space game thread are the two heaviest contributors to my Steam wish list.
I bought it a few minutes ago. My biggest problem at the moment is that you cannot zoom out far enough to see more of the map. The game seems to rely on the mini map far too much.
Also the control scheme is a bit wacky. Uses arrows instead of normal WASD. You can change the binding but unfortunately all four of the WASD keys are already being used so have to keep adjusting (seems like a weird design choice).
I will try it a bit more tomorrow depending on IRMA. I may refund until they get the zoom working better.
I do think I would like the game if only I could zoom out more.
Zoom isn’t bothering me so far. It is kind of odd that you can zoom the mini map pretty significantly but not the main game map. I’m not seeing much action so far. This may be a problem with the game, actually. . .
So it’s a light base-building/tower defense mix. The long term goal is to bulld a something something flux capacitor, get 100k (I think) people, and get the hell out of dodge. Yoour mother ship can fly around the map at first but it can’t actually hyperjump or something and needs to be converted into a home base. It’s interesting that you get to poke around before settling in. There are many limiting factors in terms of slowing expansion/etc but first and foremost it’s the swirling mist which is poisonous to our alien dudes and dudettes. Our unfortunate, vaguely Jamaican, aliens. The Mother ship emits a bubble of air and once you land acts as a major power hub (you are unable to move the mother ship after landing it). From there you need to build relays to extend your power range and purifiers to emit zones of breathable air. This costs resources, and time. We’ll come back to the time. Anyway the mother ship is a big ole 3d printer (which, uh, seems impractical but never mind). so you create stuff by printing it. Unlike the mother ship, every other building you have can fly and can be redeployed as you deem fit. The “depoyment” flight - the one that comes after the item is created and before it is landed the first time - is free. Every other flight uses a resource.
So far I’ve found 3 minable resources. you must build extractors to mine them. All buildings use power, and at first it won’t seem like you’ll be taxing your mother ship any time soon. Two of these resources, yellow and red, are used to build stuff. The other is green, and is used to research. One of these also pays for building flight but I can’t recall which one. Nodes have resource limits and can run out. However, once they do they begin regenerating the resource very slowly. They cannot be mined again until they fully “regrow”. So some of your early expansion is about locating necessary resource nodes. You can make out their outlines in the mist, incidentally.
I mentioned population. Very soon you’re building cribs (which require two otehr buildings just to function; those support buildings are essentially there to act as power drains and each has a radius it applies to, so it’s something of a limit on surface area as well). Cribs store pop (1000) and grow it (can’t recall the base rate). There are a number of upgrade buildings which boost both of these factors, unlocked via research. Getting these upgrades made, however, requires a little futzing beyond research.
One early building is the barracks, which is alos a printer but only makes turrets, not buildings. You’re thinking “the combat part, finally!”. Uh, sort of? I’ve got 3 types of turrets, and got them dotting all over, and well I’ve watched some combat happening and right now it’s all rather sedate. There are monster lairs scattered around the map and they will emit waves of monsters periodically. I’ve had several new types of monsters appear but it’s nothing two basic towers haven’t been able to handle (even though one monster is better off being dealt with by one of the other towers I researched). If you get too close to a lair, you can agitate it. There’s a visual indicator to help with this. But. . . why? I can’t kill lairs - it requires a special turret - so naturally I won’t agitate. I can see several other layers on the map but right now only one is attacking.
Printers - both the mothership and the barracks, and apparently you can build another printer that can do buildings - can be upgraded via print modules. These are actual buildings. Each one can be set to. . . I don’t really understand this part. Produce a hologram that allows a printer to build special buildings. There are 4 military and 4 civilian options. You can only do 1 at a time, the printer needing to be in range of the module (and both have to be powered, of course). This doesn’t feel very worthwhile mechanically. There’s nothing really stopping you from building enough to cover all your bases except power and space. This sort of feels like a false “oh, you have to carefully choose how to use them” mechanic. The modules themselves can be switched to different modes (asit were). This costs time. So let’s talk about time.
It takes dozens of seconds to build most things (the basic turret is 20s), if not minutes. It takes minutes to research. Modules need 20 seconds to swtich over to whichever upgrade mode. Again, this all feels like something that might matter, but so far the pace of the game has been rather slow.Yes, if I was getting hammered from multiple sides and stretched thin in terms of resources these things would matter. But 'm not, playing on medium (there are 3 difficulties). So basically I’ve been playing this for 49 minutes waiting for something exciting to happen. No go, so far. And there’s no way to speed up time, which is really frustrating.
I’m within 150 units of power of maxing the mother ship. The upgrade to the ship’s reactor also requires I have a certain amount of population (6k iirc). So it’s possible to put yourself in a situation where you cannot research it for lack of pop capacity. But it’s not a hard situation to remedy; you can destroy existing structures to free up power (and possibly turn some stuff off but not destroy it).
Some buildings, and some or all towers, can be upgraded once you do the necessary research and I assume pay for the upgrade. Towers do not fire (and nothing can fly I think) while upgrading.
The flux capacitor thingy requires collecting a certain amount of 4 special resources I have not encountered yet. So that’s the quest that’s driving you but right now there’s zero pressure. And there’s no reason not to take your time and make sure you are good and ready before you start agitating lairs. I’ll need more resource nodes to get the high level research, sure (my one research producing node only has like 455 max units and I think costs eventually hit 1000s). So maybe on Hard it’s, you know, harder. And more monsters are coming after you. I’m too early in the game to write it off. But it’s been a sort of weird experience so far.
The idea is interesting, no question. I’m unsure about the execution. More later!
Awesome write-up. Sounds a bit like fallout 4 with the bases…You build but not sure why…Keep us updated!