Fantasy Tower Defense

Genre: Tower Defense

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Prison Games

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Review:

Fantasy Tower Defense, was released as an asset on the Unity Asset Store in 2019 as Tower Defense 2D, brought to the mobile devices as a low-effort asset flip in 2019, and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020. As you might expect, this game is is a Tower Defense game… with a Medieval fantasy theme. And if that sounds like a generic name and a generic game description to you, you’ve already got two really big hints about the sort of game this is.

The game’s hand-drawn 2D visuals are… fine. Not terrible, not great, but sufficient, if a bit too tiny to be easily discernible. However, they are pretty generic and forgettable. The music, likewise, is fine – a simple orchestral piece that sounds to my ears like something that is almost certainly a fair use song slapped onto this game because it sounds vaguely “epic”… but not impactful or in any way memorable.

And if my repeated use of the word “generic” hasn’t already driven it home yet, this game’s gameplay is also, similarly, about as generic as they come. I would complain about the lack of a tutorial or any instruction whatsoever except, if you’ve ever played a Tower Defense game before now, there is nothing in this game that you haven’t seen a zillion times in countless other games in the genre. Select one of multiple designated plots of land to build towers, choose from one of the standard tower types (melee, ranged, slowdown, area effect, etc.), manage your resources and keep too many enemies from slipping by.

I suppose there are two things this game gets reasonably right – the optional touchscreen implementation here works well, and the $5 price tag is about the highest this game could be priced at without seeming like a rip-off. That’s not to say the touchscreen is magnificent or the price is a bargain – both are sufficient, nothing more.

But in the end, I’ve gotta’ say that I’ve played quite a lot of Tower Defense games on the Nintendo Switch, and while you could do far worse than Fantasy Tower Defense, you can do far, far better. There’s virtually nothing wrong with this game, but this game also does nothing noteworthy or interesting. It is completely forgettable and average at best. It is, in a word, as generic as this genre gets. And I don’t know about you, but I tend to crave more than just “generic” and “average” in my games.

tl;dr – Fantasy Tower Defense is quite possibly the most generic, bland, forgettable Tower Defense game I’ve ever played. There’s nothing truly bad here, but there’s nothing great either.

Grade: C

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