Bugvasion TD

Genre: Tower Defense

Players: 1

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Review:

Bugvasion TD is a Tower Defense game released on PC in 2021 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2023. In this game, Earth is threatened by a fleet of tiny alien spacecraft (slight shades of Hitchhiker’s Guide here) who decide to wage war by brainwashing Earth’s bugs and sending them into a teenager’s bedroom. Said teenager is recruited through his TV by a green Army Men sargent and entrusted with setting up traps and other defenses to fend off the bugs.

As that plot synopsis indicates, Bugvasion takes a very tongue-in-cheek tone, and throughout the game in loading screens and voice clips during gameplay, you’ll see characters rattle off countless famous war quotes and action film one liners. It is all extremely cheesy, and whether you love it or hate it will likely come down to personal preference.

The rest of the presentation here isn’t quite as wacky, but is generally still decent, using 2D visuals backed by a vaguely cinematic soundtrack. Nothing here is especially impressive or memorable, but it all works well enough.

I wish I could say the same for the gameplay.

At least in concept, this game has a lot of goods stuff going for it. Players must balance installing and upgrading defensive towers while also using direct attacks to take out particularly bothersome groups of enemies. What’s more, there’s a pretty sizable upgrade tree between levels, giving players a lot of options in terms of progress.

Unfortunately, this otherwise decent gameplay is completely ruined by terrible controls that make it a pain to select what you want to use or interact with with stiff, clunky, and at times unresponsive controls. This combines with cursors that are extremely difficult to see, making it difficult to distinguish whether you’re about to upgrade a tower or demolish it, and sometimes you just have to hope that the cursor moved where you wanted it to when you were frantically trying to get it over there. Using the cursor to target enemies with a direct attack is a little more reliable, but painfully slow, and if you change your mind it sometimes won’t let you cancel the attack, forcing you to waste it.

Given the screen’s layout and the clunky selection, I thought that maybe this game was really meant for touchscreen controls, but Bugvasion TD doesn’t support the touchscreen at all, so there goes that idea. This wouldn’t have worked perfectly anyway, as sometimes your menu selections are halfway off-screen, meaning you have to select them going off of memory. Yeah, this game is a mess.

Bugvasion TD has all the right elements in place to be a decent Tower Defense game, but the issues with the controls and the terrible cursor design ruin that potential. When you’re just as likely to destroy a tower when you’re trying to upgrade it, something has gone very, very wrong in the game design, and since this is your primary interaction with the game, I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone to play this game.

tl;dr – Bugvasion TD is a Tower Defense game where players set up towers to defend against invading bugs. There are some decent ideas here, but the gameplay is ruined by terrible, clunky, and sometimes unresponsive controls, paired with cursor design that makes it extremely difficult to tell what you’re selecting. Don’t waste your time on this game.

Grade: D+

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