There is a steam page now! Wishlisted!
Yes, I played both on Kongregate and then also got the PC version of the first game and played that too. Lots of fun and a pretty well executed TD. I would agree with @peacedog that the heroes are more active in Lost Hope. They are pretty powerful once you level them or their weapons up and you’ll be moving them around a lot to handle various rushes. The leveling is similar in that you up the character and their abilities, but the weapons and accessories are the big plusses.
Oh and one of the characters is a parody of a character from the Walking Dead. You’ll know the second you see it, or when you read the character description. Last Hope does have a sense of humor at times, though I think Defense Grid does a better job of that too.
I tried this a while back and it felt too clicky for my tastes and I returned it before I had played 2 hours to get my refund. At this price ($1.69) it seems like a no-brainer, but has anyone played this & does the clicking subside / become not necessary?
Played it a million years ago and I don’t remember.
Is not just another TD game, as the author is a very artistry indie dev and put a lot of love in the games he make.
If I remember rightly Tman, you thought you had to click to shoot enemies when you only need to put your pointer within range and it’ll shoot automatically. There’s no wonder you thought it was clicky! :-) The only time you click is to place/upgrade towers, charge and fire your attacks up, and to target specific enemies so your towers focus on them. It’s not a very clicky game, but it’s certainly active.
ID is probably my favourite TD because its unique in so many ways, particularly for having an emotionally affecting existential story that relates to the actual gameplay itself. The towers are interesting and it has plenty of design smarts that emerge as you play. It is a tough game though, with a somewhat divisive and trippy presentation so it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.
For a few quid though it’s a no-brainer. Tom had this to say about it some years ago:
“This is a damn fine tower defense game, and probably the most pleasant surprise among them all. In fact, it’s pretty much the reason I’m writing this column on tower defense games. Until I stumbled across this gem, I was ready to just dink around with Plants vs. Zombies for a while. And really, stuff like Immortal Defense is what makes videogaming such a great hobby. You’re tooling along, bored with the usual stuff, underwhelmed by the big-budget epic stuff, ready to dismiss an entire genre with a weary jaded wave, and out of the blue – BANG! – you find something that thrills and delights you when you least expect it.”
It’s got a lovely soundtrack too!
You have a better memory than me! but now that you say that, I recall that discussion. I should retry this one.
I want to thank @Bernie_Dy for mentioning Last Hope in the Fear the Walking Dead thread, I wouldn’t have known about it.
Link just in case you need it. Seems a steal at $3.
Are there any others I should be looking at getting during the sale?
thanks for bringing this up. It looks nice. I’m going to buy it!
I picked up Radiant Defense during the sale and I’ve got to say this is a decent little TD game. Each level starts out with some fixed squares and you are given a number of additional tiles during play (I wish there was a way to see how many I’d eventually get - sometimes you get a few per level, sometimes none) allowing you to create a wide variety of mazes. Interesting that they disable placing these tiles during play most likely to discourage juggling.
Most of the weapons are your typical (crowd control flame, tesla, long range, short range guns, etc) and enemies come in shielded / non-shielded and with some regenerating health - necessitating a quick kill. There are also resource amplifiers (fans that suck in close deaths to give extra $$), some super weapons - that you can only deploy one of, but cost an arm & a leg (and you will save up for these).
Rounds are getting increasingly lengthy, currently incrementing by 5 and I’m doing 50 waves right now - which takes about an hour. BUT and this is a big BUT - auto saves in between waves, so you can quit & it will pick up where you left off - and the game also allows you to replay the last level (in case a few creeps got through), which I really, really appreciate. I hate replaying entire levels, and this allows you to keep a “perfect” score.
Thanks for pointing this out @amandachen, it’s a nice little TD and I’m really enjoying it! I would recommend anyone who enjoys TDs to pick this up.
Any of you darlings played this one? Talk to me.
I haven’t, but it really does look like a cool idea.
Now I know why reviewers wait until they finish a game to post a recommendation.
UGH. The final 5 or so levels are just meatshields, you have to find a single strategy - how to kill everything with missiles, which are slow firing. So you have an entire level with a wide variety of shielded, fast, pregnant, etc and then the “boss” is a huge meatshield which half your weapons will be ineffective against. So my praises of having a save on a wave is completely worthless because now I’ve had to completely reset the entire game because no amount of retrying is going to work.
I HATE games where they decide to change the rules for the boss. What a waste of time. Take it off your wishlists.
So I’ve been playing Last Hope for the past week or so. I like it a lot.
Like Defense Grid, you can replay each level many times - On normal, On hard, then for each normal / hard, there is a “challenge” which introduced some other mechanic - limited # of towers or lives for example.
There are special areas that give you anywhere between 10-20 scenarios. So for example, you’ll have the same map, but entrances / exits will change and some of these are really really difficult. So when you’re tiring of the campaign, you can mix it up in these arenas.
Three of these arenas are endless, but if I could ever nominate a game for worst implementation of endless, this would be it - every 5 levels, they take away half your towers. it seems random, so instead of tougher / more creeps, presto you just loose half your towers! It’s pretty hard to recover from and rather than getting to a point where you are using all the tower locations and upgrading your towers, you’re constantly weighing “should I just horde cash to rebuy towers when half these disappear”. Unfortunate choice in an otherwise well thought out game.
I have a few gripes - but they are minor right now. Besides the endless, I can’t seem to see paths and it seems like I’m always restarting a level because of some exit that I didn’t see because I didn’t zoom out / scroll, or creeps come from some abandon shed / copse of trees that is not evident until you play the round. The restart isn’t too bad because they’re all pretty short (3-6 waves) and you have fast forward, and because of the completionist in me, I’m always replaying them to get a perfect score anyway, so not that big of a deal.
Probably the biggest complaint so far is that that your hero / tower upgrades are so influential, that it’s really easy to just “play more, get more money, upgrade and then come back and tackle this level” instead of trying to find the right combination of towers. For example, there was this one level where I beat myself up on (I had completed about 20 levels, and just realized the “challenge icon” and decided to try these) - and on the 2nd map, I just couldn’t get it! I played / upgraded my hero and then just barely made it through, but then the next day I revisited the poison tower because I had been discarding it in lieu of other towers and the misting option on that tower basically made that challenge mode easy to do without any hero upgrades. So because the game allows me to grind and “get gud”, I’m not experimenting as much as I would like to. Also because of this, it’s nigh impossible to give advice to anyone because there is no way to have the same tower / hero makeup as someone else. This was a lot of text to say that while I’m enjoying the game, I would have preferred a more repeatable playthrough.
Who else besides @Bernie_Dy has played this? Anyone else have any observations? @lordkosc what did you think of it?
Great observations, I agree with most of what you noted.
I just loaded up Defend Your Life. It feels like a low budget copy of a million other tower defense games…But it’s not really working for me despite some good reviews. Passable if you have nothing else to play but I really should quit it and get to Defense Grid 2.
Played it, finished it. It’s a fairly standard game, not as good as the best TD games, it tries to do something different with it’s heroes, but they control poorly, so IMO, end up just being another tower, more or less effective depending on how much points you’ve poured into them.
Difficulty spikes all over the place though, you can 3 star most maps with just your heroes and very basic towers, other you need high gear heroes and very specific (and highly upgraded) towers to do at all well. And these requirements are a bit random, easy map, hard map, easy map again…
I would agree with this. Furthering this, the game is constantly reminding me to upgrade some tower “before venturing further” and it seems like I can never save up that much $$ for a new hero because I’m always spending this on upgrades. I finally just caved & bought my 4th hero, but without my grinding the various levels /arenas, I can see how this game must have had a store to buy points in a previous life. Yup.
I thought so too. The giveaway for me was when you research stuff it immediately says “research complete”. It really seemed like at one point that took more time and was a draw to keep you coming back each day. I like it better this way.
I started playing Dungeon Warfare this week and I like it a lot more than I expected to based on its ugliness.I agree with Rock8man that’s it’s ugly, but I think the gameplay makes it worth it. I’ve completed around 10 or so maps so far. I like the map design and how there are just some perfect stops for certain trap types. So much fun to push or pull creeps to their death.
On my last map I was able to create quite a killing zone and kept them bottled up.
