This is a new fun Tower Defense game by a small indie studio called Coffee Stain Studios.
The game offers both Single Player and Coop, and is currently in beta…you can buy it on Steam either at $13.49 (currently 10% off $14.99 list) or spring for a 2-pack at $10 bucks each. It is slated to go live April 15th.
I’ve played through “normal” and it’s an interesting take. You build mazes and then can choose between upgrading your own guns (assault/sniper/freeze) or building / upgrading towers. The game pauses between waves to allow you to upgrade then you start that wave. A wide variety of hordes makes it challenging to pick the right thing to upgrade. So far, I’m finding it better to upgrade my own guns.
It’s kinda cool standing on top of your maze, shooting the buggers as they wind through it. This technique solves a TD weakness where you are not in control of which enemy gets the focus. Now with you at the helm, you get to choose how to maneuver and shoot.
I dig the aesthetic (love the clean, art nouveau-esque, mixed with vegetation look) and the idea. I can never really defend my love of tower defense games, even to myself, as I don’t like overly mathematical games and really that’s what they are - optimising damage output and all that - but they’re just engaging.
A friend of mine gave me a copy from the two pack. I’ve only played the beta so far (which seems to have just one map), but it’s got potential.
The level they have available feels pretty simplistic, and I never really felt too challenged with it once I figured out what turrets work against what, but with a little more development time and some balancing I feel like it could be a pretty strong game. It will certainly be interesting to play a TD game coop.
This thread over on their forums has some good layouts for your maze.
My favorite so far is:
I’m finding out that maxing out investment in my own guns works for me. I’m a highly mobile, highly destructive tower than can shoot from anywhere and the stats at the end of a game show that I deal more damage than all my towers combined.
I picked this one up as well. I’d love to get some coop going. Steam name is the same as on this forum. I’m also in several of the Qt3 steam groups including the main group if that helps anybody find me.
Picked this up last night and played around with the first single player map a bit. I think its fun, but man the aliens that can only die by headshots are a pita. It seems you really have to upgrade your sniper rifle quickly if you want to have any chance to get by. Looking forward to trying out some co-op also.
I started out maxing my sniper, but then I found the joys of the assault rifle.
Protip: go all the way up to the line where the aliens first enter the map and start shooting there with your assault. You can walk backwards / warp back to the maze later.
This game hit one of my weird pet peeves. When I first start a PC game, I usually go straight to options and change keybindings to things I’m more familiar with. It grates on my nerves when a game doesn’t update in-game text to match the current key binds.
In Sanctum, I changed the “Use” function to the E key. I probably wouldn’t have been so annoyed by it except it turns out that you don’t “Use” anything at all. You’re hitting that key to start the enemy wave after setup. The tutorial told me to “Press ENTER to start the next enemy wave!” Fuckers.
Otherwise, I’m really liking the visual design of the game.
Some DLC just came out, with two new maps and three new weapons.
I was terrible at this though, the last time I tried it, and I just couldn’t deal with the tank-like enemies with tons of health. Would it make more sense to split into specializations between the hand weapon and the towers, say letting the towers take care of the massed enemies and the hand weapon for the smaller groups of harder enemies?
I kind of half gave up on the last level, but my strategy was to focus on pumping the sniper rifle up AND getting my towers up.
The most important thing is setting up blocks to funnel aliens through a maze that makes them take longer to get to your core. You should plan ahead for this and complete about half of it almost right away to give you some time. Ideally your maze (there is likely a better word for this) will feature long corridors that help support easy head shots and it will be positioned in such a way so that enemies have to pass a single turret multiple times (so you get more benefit from high level turrets).
You probably want to throw a few turrets up at good spots and upgrade them a little before focusing on others. My personal favorite turret is the lightning one because it has a chain lightning like effect when upgraded. Massed cheapo machine gun turrets seem to do well against the little guys.
As time passes you should expand your turret network and upgrade key turrets one by one. I’m not sure this is the best way to do it, but when it comes to lightning turrets, i prefer to upgrade them to chain before moving on. With other turrets i will only get them up to level 2 or 3 and then make more generally unless the location is REALLY good.
Sniper rifle is the best weapon by far in my experience. Upgrading it will HUGELY increase the damage and perhaps more importantly, increase the ammo you can hold per clip which hugely increases dps. the sniper rifle (and also lightning turrets) is what will easily kill those big guys from long range. You can also just use the sniper rifle as a rifle, shooting a tank in the head from behind as it runs to your core.
For the sniper rifle, be sure to place teleporters in key locations so you can snipe from one location, teleport to the next one and then immediately have a corridor you can snipe down directly in a straight line so the (head) shots are easier. You should not be running around if you can help it unless the alien shit hits the fan.
Yeah, I spend the first handful of waves mainly setting up the funneling paths, though then my towers are so distributed that they don’t do much against the tank guys. I have been neglecting upgrading the sniper rifle though, and I should experiment a bit more with the lightning towers. Thanks for the tips!
