Tower Dwellers Review

If I dwelt in a tower (rather than lived in it – dwelling seems to imply that people haven’t invented TVs or fridges yet), I’m pretty sure I’d want to be an archer. Archers, it seems to me, have got it figured out: not for them the life of a swordsman, sitting in a tin can and beating your face against your enemy’s face until one of those faces breaks. No, archers stay well away from dangerous creatures, making their entire houses into larger versions of aforementioned tins (aka towers). Better yet, if someone threatens your tin/home, you simply shoot them with sticks of wood until they die from little-sticks-of-wood poisoning.

So it is with Tower Dwellers. A Unit-Crafting Tower Defense game, it’s served from roughly the same cauldron as Kingdom Rush and Clash of Clans. It pits you against the obligatory hordes of monsters marching along fixed paths, and gives you towers filled with cute wee folk with which to stop them. Your basic towers only produce peasants, little better than yokel-flavored speed bumps in the monsters’ path, but add support buildings next to your towers and out pop steel-hatted soldiers, rustic-looking archers, or bearded wizards. Adding more buildings either gives them better versions of their original equipment (soldiers become sergeants become knights, and so on), or hybridizes it to give you things like paladins who can heal nearby allies, or musketeers who add a bit of a magical zing to their attacks. Your soldiers march out from their towers to a point specified by you, so you can back up the meatiness of your knights with the spicy relish of your marksmen – and prevent the monsters from blending them all together to make a sort of bloody gazpacho.

And it’s fun. There’s a delight in the first few levels of pushing your little men about with the touch-screen interface, whisking them into the path of enemies and away again. The art style, while far from original, is cute and easy on the eye, and there’s a nice range of monsters to gawk at and then butcher. The game also offers rudimentary but ultimately charming narration: the background story (wherein you must rid the land of monsters) sets the scene even when it’s obviously piffle. It’s not afraid of being challenging either: there’s a lot to do in the more difficult levels, and I found that the game started to stretch my mastery of its interface relatively early on. In fact, this was the first difficulty I had with the game. I found that it worked better on my PC emulator (Bluestacks) than it did on my touch-screen, where the accuracy and speed of the mouse interface became more useful as unit micro-management became more important in determining my success.
Sadly, my initial pleasure wore off sooner than I’d have hoped. Part of this was that most of the levels have their challenges spread unevenly, with tricky setup and boss phases bookending rather humdrum midsections. But a more important part of that wearing process was that Tower Dwellers does a poor job of directing you towards its more interesting gameplay elements. You can pull off some pretty neat tricks, like moving rally points around to confuse the AI pathing; this makes the more stubborn monsters move backwards to chase your steel-suited fellas and gives your archers more time to pincushion them. Neither the gameplay itself nor the occasional tooltip will lead you towards this feature, though.

The game is also pretty tight-lipped on the relative merits of the different units you can build, leaving you to discover them for yourself – though I found that most of the hybrid units were rather useless, and couldn’t keep up with their thoroughbred counterparts. For these particular tower dwellers, the gods have decided that if you’re going to be an archer, be an archer all the way; don’t mess about trying to wear a tin hat that doesn’t suit you. This was a small niggle, but it became emblematic of how I felt about the game: the hybrid units looked cool, but weren’t much use for actually beating the game. And though your soldiers can swan about, rushing from one lane of attack to another, you never get the feeling that they’re achieving very much, even when you win.
In short, Tower Dwellers doesn’t seem to have made the most out of its interesting features. About halfway through it fell into the same repetitive rhythm that so many TD games do, that same rhythm you fall into when you’re trying to get the last bits of soup out of the bottom of a can. I watched the monsters amble towards my tins of sword-twirling human spam, and I thought: they’re probably having more fun than me, with their fangs and their crazy costumes. Screw being an archer and screw dwelling in some soup-tin of a tower. I want a game that lets me invite those monsters to a party.