I must have seen hundreds of Tower Defense games pass thru my email boxes throughout the years (Yes, I watch indies very closely). My reaction has always been meh, hard pass. I find Tower Defense games boring and unoriginal. When you try them out, you are just asking for a spike of stress in your life where you did not need it. But this time, when Tempest Tower came around, I was intrigued. Yes, it was obviously YET ANOTHER Tower Defense game, but it looked really well-made, and much more visually appealing than most of the ones I had seen before. This meant I was going to try to appreciate the genre one more time.

The mechanics

You know the drill. In a Tower Defense game you get waves of enemies that try to invade your base or tower, and you need to fend them off or kill them before they come and keep your tower intact until the wave finishes or the time runs out.

It’s the same thing here in Tempest Tower from the developer Half Past Yellow. You have a base tower that is here to collect power, and needs to be charged. Once you turn it on, critters in the area come out and rush to the tower, as if hypnotized. In Tempest Tower, you have a character on screen that has a role to play as the waves of enemies enter the map. You have to keep them away as long as possible until your base tower is finished charging. This is what marks the end of a wave.

You can build structures to defend your tower. But you only start with 3 structures that you can select to build in your deck. As you fend off another wave of critters, you will be offered a random new card for your deck, allowing for a new kind of structure to be built. Your main weapon against the critters are automated turrets. The turrets shoot bullets at the critters, until they die. To make turrets shoot bullets, you need energy, and energy comes from other types of structures that provide some source of power: windmills, or furnaces.

You get to choose between turrets that shoot fast, and turrets that shoot slow but have a longer range. There are also turrets that freeze enemies temporarily too, which means you have to combine them with proper turrets to finish the job. At the beginning, your options are however limited as you start with 3 cards in your deck, and usually that means one card to secure power, one card for the usual turret, and that leaves you only with one last card to experiment with. Luckily, the first wave of enemies is usually relatively soft, so you can get around for at least one wave with such limited options.

To build stuff you need resources. You start with an allotment, but that’s barely enough to build a few first structures. You need to have a strategy for resource collection between each wave. Resources are collected by killing enemies and grabbing their souls or whatever that’s left after they are gone is supposed to represent.

You have some natural flowers on the field, at strategic location, that feed off these souls, that can you use to collect energy that you can then reuse to build new structures. For example, killing 50 enemies in vicinity of said flower will make this flower stock on 50 souls, that can collect afterwards between 2 waves. The problem is… once you collect the flower, it’s gone. So here’s a new trade-off you have to make: keep a flower as is for another wave, in order to maximize your gains, or pluck it now, because you just can’t wait another round in your current predicament? Hard choices, my friends…

The other way to collect resources it by grabbing the little souls by yourself with your character on screen, while this is rather limited as you will be busy doing many things when the waves start moving. Busy, you say? Busy doing what? That’s a great point that differentiates Tempest Tower from other Tower Defense games. Some of the critters glue your turrets and disable them, and when this happens you need to go and clean them up with a brush of your broom. To support your defenses you can also move around and send some explosive balls that exist on the map. If you use a windmill to power your turrets, you may want to use your broom to speed up the windmill and accelerate the shooting pace of your turrets. If you chose to use furnaces instead, you need to fill them with fuel before they run out. And the more turrets they power, the more they consume, so the more often you need to refuel them. The fuel is pieces of coal that you have to grab on the map. You can also grab some small animals (winged eyes) while the waves progress and bring them back to your tower for additional power ups.

With your character, you can also kill enemies, like Mario but without mushrooms: you have to jump on them (several times if they are intact!). While jumping on enemies is a fun pastime, it’s not going to save your base when you have 40 enemies advancing fast. It’s just too slow. In any case, as you can see, you are not going to be taking a break and sipping coffee when the wave starts. This is intense!

Other cards in your deck can help beyond pure offensive means. You have ice mines that will freeze all enemies in a small area is one enemy walks on it. Practical to slow down the wave of critters and let your turrets get rid of those who stopped. You have bumpers to push enemies into obstacles or cacti, which is moderately effective but cheap to make. But you also have regular mines, and traps.

Expanding Map

After each wave that you survive, another part of the level becomes accessible. You start with only a very small portion of the map before the first wave, and progressively until wave 5, the area opens up. Which means you can put turrets and other offensive or defensive means further away from your tower in order to weaken the critters way before they reach the final steps.

In theory, this is great news, but you are constantly starved for resources! Building new structures away means you need energy, and such energy will only come from killing a lot of enemies. There is a critical mass that you need to achieve from one wave to another - if you lack energy input, you will be screwed sooner or later as more powerful waves will land on your tower and give you no respite. So the game loop is:

• Be very tactical to maximize your energy collection
• Pass one wave
• Collect energy
• Invest energy into further defenses
• Rinse and repeat

That’s a lot easier said than done.

Progression

In terms of progression, between each wave you can pick a new card to add to your list of action, among 3 random ones. Since you start wave 1 with just the bare minimum, making a careful choice for your next card is critical. Choose a useless card and you are making your life more difficult for no reason.

When you pass a level you get a new card added to your loadout choice, but that does not change the fact that you can only pick 3 cards at the beginning for the next level’s wave 1. But better options emerge to produce energy (the Dynamo, that can produce electricity for 45s as long as you jump once on it, and the relay, that can link turrets further away from the energy source), and that should be considered as potential replacements for your default deck.

Since I have not yet beaten the Desert series of Levels, I can’t tell you what’s next, but I imagine that you have other biomes later on with different themes (ice? prairie? who knows) with new surprises in terms of enemies. It makes me a little tired just thinking about it…

Hard!

It’s typical for Tower Defense games to push the difficulty to 11, and Tempest Tower is no exception. After the tutorial, I kept failing on the first mission for probably 10 times in a row. Until I finally GOT it. Then I kept failing the second one. Apparently I was not the only one struggling with the difficulty. A lot of early access users whined on the community forums and the developer pushed a patch fairly soon after the release to rebalance things a bit. Following that patch, I was able to finish 2 more levels. I am currently stuck on Desert Level 4, and it’s not for lack of trying. In this level, you start with very little and you have two waves of enemies coming your way, up and down. Right now, no matter how many turrets I build (with my best efforts), the second wave kills me every time.

It’s not that the turrets are not effective, but the one type of critter that glues my turrets as they pass by is a major problem: it renders them super slow to shoot. And if I stay next to my turrets to ensure they don’t get glued, I can’t go and collect other resources or do other activities that increase my changes of survival. Right now this means I run around a lot, and can’t get my turrets cleaned up early enough. This is overwhelming. There’s probably a better way to do things, I still need to figure it out. You can see what the first wave looks like before things get worse in the video below.

The thing that’s really fun with Tempest Tower is… your broom. When a wave goes through, your last resort is to push them away as long as possible by brushing them away, literally. It becomes a button mashing exercise. The faster you hit the button, the more effective your broom is, and it’s sometimes what makes the difference between a failed level and a win. Don’t count on it when there are hundreds of units on screen, but it has its effect if you deal with a dozen or two.

The good thing is that rounds are pretty quick. You don’t need to spend one hour to progress, if your tactics are sound you should be able to pass a level in 10 minutes or so. It’s short enough to keep me motivated and willing to give it a go.

Perfect on Steam Deck

The game is Verified for the Steam Deck, and works very well, while you won’t get 60 FPS easily at lower watts. I find 7W TDP to be a sweet spot to get stable 40FPS in-game, which is good enough for the type of action needed. The game is made using Unity, which may explain why the performance overall is not stellar. Still, the controls, the fronts, the UI is all very well adapted to the Deck. It’s a great example of a game that seems to have been made with portable gaming in mind. Very enjoyable.

Still Early

The game just game out and is in Early Access, so things may change down the road and hopefully improve. I hope for a less punishing difficulty, or some hints to get to a winning tactic faster when you lose. As for what are the plans for the Early Access phase, this is what the developers had to say:

We don’t yet know what the future holds, but we expect Tempest Tower to remain in Early Access for around 9 months. We will use that time to add content, quality of life features, and new game modes. The game will launch on Early Access as a tight experience with all core mechanics present, we aim to have 2-3 hours of base gameplay with endless extra hours of experimenting with loadouts and highscore hunting on top.

In any case, even in its current shape and form, Tempest Tower is a brilliant take on not just the Tower Defense genre, but resource management (and micromanagement when the waves start) under heavy constraints. It forces you to consider even a little bit of optimization you can make to survive.

And that, my friends, is a real fun challenge.

Since it is our policy not to recommend games that are still in Early Access, it won’t make it yet into our list of recommended games, but it’s a potential candidate when it hits 1.0 later this year.

If you want to give it a go, you can buy it on Steam, but before doing so you might as well just try the demo to see if it’s for you or not.

Note: we have been offered a key to review this new title for its EA release.