Otherwar

Genre: Tower Defense

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Untold Tales)

Otherwar is a Tower Defense game with 2-Stick Shooter and Bullet Hell elements released on PC in 2023 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game puts players in the role of an angel defending the gates leading to heaven from an invading horde of skeletons, ghouls, and demons.

This game’s presentation uses simple 2D visuals for its backgrounds and characters, backed by a somewhat subdued soundtrack that makes for a somewhat gloomy atmosphere overall.

The core gameplay here is pretty traditional Tower Defense stuff – enemies come in waves and travel along paths, and you must prepare for their attack by building different kinds of towers along those paths, with these towers having distinct abilities and with the ability to upgrade them to make them even more effective, but with your ability to build constrained by the amount of in-game currency you’ve earned. Eliminate all enemies and you can move on to the next map, but if a handful of them manage to breach your defenses, you’ll lose and need to restart the current map.

Otherwar adds to this formula by giving your character some limited ability to fight back against the horde directly, as well as a need to evade their attacks. If done correctly, your attacks can weaken tough enemies so your towers are better able to take them down, pick off enemies that get through your defenses, or take the fight directly to more troublesome enemies as soon as they appear before they create a bigger problem later on. However, if your character takes enough hits, not only will you be temporarily disabled but it will count as damage to your base as well.

To keep things interesting, the game has a skill tree system where you can spend experience to buy permanent upgrades, as well as a Roguelike-esque system during stages where every few waves of enemies, you can choose from a selection of randomized upgrades for the duration of that stage. The problem with both of these mechanics is that they progress far too slowly – if you can’t beat a stage, you’ll have to play through it multiple times before you get enough experience to upgrade, and the in-stage upgrades are so scarce that you’ll only be getting three over the course of the entire stage.

This is particularly frustrating because this game’s difficulty is already on the high side, and even when playing the game on easy mode you’ll likely have a difficult time beating even the early stages. And even with upgrades, your attacks never really feel all that powerful, just chipping away at even smaller enemies’ health in much the same way as the towers do.

Because of the high difficulty and the ineffectual upgrades, much of what makes Otherwar unique within the Tower Defense genre is lost. What’s here is still decent, but it feels like this game could have doubled down on these additional elements to create something really special. Instead what we have is a tough Tower Defense game with some extra elements you’ll have to multitask while playing.

tl;dr – Otherwar is a challenging Tower Defense game with 2-Stick Shooter and Bullet Hell elements where you take the role of an angel defending the gates of heaven from a horde of hell spawn. The added elements here are promising, but ultimately underwhelm, leaving this game as an overly-tough Tower Defense game that seems to fall short of its potential.

Grade: C+

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