Warstone TD (PC) Review

Warstone TD does what genre games should do more of: stay within the formula and add their own interesting systems. Far too many stray from the roots, in the process alienating the very fans the game was trying to aim at. To this end, this is aimed squarely at tower defence players, but differentiates itself with the addition of city and RPG systems.

The story revolves around an old wizard, who sees a vision of the troll army destroying all of civilisation, attempting to reverse this future by building up his city to withstand the attack. For a TD game, the mere fact there is a story (albeit extremely simplistic) is a fun addition. It serves as a way to tie the levels together with the city. The stories are told in simple comic format of new plot points or sometimes text dumps with the wizard.

Levels unfold in very typical TD fashion; the player has a small amount of gold, and they must build units in certain areas around the path the enemies are going to walk on. At the beginning, the units are very limited, simple peasants or archers. As the action goes on, more units are unlocked, such as riflemen or mages. Additionally, each type can be upgraded, becoming more and more powerful, such as the peasant getting a spear or the archers becoming amazons.

Each wave, as the enemies are killed, they drop gold (to buy more units), a 'stone' or a spell. The spells are simpler to explain; they might be things like a fireball to do damage, or an ice storm to slow units down. The stones are a summoning location, and in general the only way to get new units down excluding any starting stones on the map. This means that despite having the gold, until the player gets a new stone to place somewhere on the map, they will have to make do with what they have.

The battles are pretty fun with all the units doing different things. The infantry hit fast and hard, but very low range; the archers have a good range, but are not that powerful; riflemen hit hard and do AoE damage, but have a very slow rate of fire. These kinds of things give an interesting angle to which units to try to build. Each level can be challenged at higher difficulties, with various penalties, but offer better rewards, such as rare resources.

On the city portion, the player manages resources, like wood or gold, to build various upgrades of buildings, such as better barracks for new infantry, or better archery ranges for newer archers. Additionally, the player can spend resources on upgrades for their units, such as faster attacks, or better range.

The last major part of the city section is the skill tree. As missions are completed, experience is learned that then translates into levels. There are three different skill trees, a physical skill tree that boosts the unit's stats, a magic tree that increases spells, and a money tree that focuses on increasing gold during battle. The skills can be reset, which encourages experimentation and, overall, it's a pretty fun as each of them play very differently. Tying everything together is definitely its strength. In this way, it is loosely reminiscent of games like XCOM in terms of the systems feeding into each other. For tower defence fans, it will be a really fun variation of the formula.