Grinding on that tower like a pop music video: Prime World Defenders

I'm a big fan of Tower defense games as what I mentally refer to as "coffee games". Games you can pour your first copy of coffee and then play while you slowly savor your home-brewed, fresh ground steaming beverage. As such, this is going to slant this review in sort of a weird manner, because Prime World Defenders is a tower defense game that gained things by losing it.

PW:D is made by Nival Entertainment, who I don't know overly much about. I believe "Prime World" is a brand for their grouping of products, though I haven't looked into any of the other ones there's at least two more. Nival apparently did some of Heroes of Might and Magic V, which I found incredibly boring. I have something like a thousand hours logged in HoMM3 and quite a few in HoMM4 even, so I was rather surprised to find HoMM5 incredibly dull and not at all what I was looking for. I'm not going to hold it against Nival though, since I have no idea how much of it was their fault. Ubisoft continued to plow on, with the next developer further simplifying odd elements of the game and adding weeaboo shit. Do you really think people who have trouble with turn based strategy games have trouble with things like hexes and the fact there's multiple currencies? People don't have trouble figuring out how different monies work. We're capitalists. Money is 90% of what we do!

Anyway, as I said, Prime World: Defenders is a tower defense game, but with something of a twist that takes over a great deal of its gameplay and resources. That twist is free to play style grinding, though as far as I can tell there are no in application purchases in PW:D. Maybe f2p is the wrong description, but it feels like someone had some good ideas vis-a-vis f2p CCGs and then grafted those ideas onto a tower defense game.

It's sort of interesting because whether or not you like this game likely starts and finishes right from the question of whether or not you can appreciate a very upfront and obvious skinner box. Actually, to be frank, the game is probably a hybrid of the core gameplay of a tower defense with the addictive spicing of a Diablo game on top of it. Does that sound good?

Before we go back to talking about the twist let's discuss production values. Prime World: Defenders is legitimately nice looking, though it does have something of a derivative art style and the weird under usage of lighting/shadows that all tower defense games seem to do. I could almost describe this issue as a "greying at the edges" feeling that it clearly shares with Defense Grid. The engine is fine and the models are good, tower animations are good. The game also has some weird voice overs that I largely just don't get. Characters, unseen and disembodied, make quips or chant warcries or other oddities. (One of them is "Let's head back, we need to replace some gears" - What? Head where? It's like wave 4 of 13 and you're worried about some cog issues?)  It does give the game a little humanity, which I appreciate, but they're pretty random and sometimes they repeat.

As for improvements or basic changes to tower defense itself, the game does have a couple neat unique to my experience or lesser used ideas. It shares with Sol Survivor the ability to use spells or abilities, during the game, though it's not as much of a key component of the game as it is in Sol Survivor which is actually a bit disappointing given it would interact well with the cards theme. Your spellbook is limited to a single slot in the early game, and there's no resource attached to using the spells, only a timer when they come back up. Added as well are random power ups for both you and the opposing death march of "touched" enemies. I believe these were added to increase randomness in the grindy levels and it's a good idea I wish more games had. I suppose it's not very "pure" but placing towers to shoot enemy totems just feels good.

Oh, there's also a provoke button, in which you gain additional resources for pulling the next wave of enemies forward early. There's benefit to watching it carefully and getting the timing right, also a little gambit where you can provoke to get just enough to finish a tower you need. I feel like it isn't necessarily a new feature, but it's a good one and it adds a ton of little tactics to the game.

The game has basic Tower defense issues that really make for a less enjoyable experience and they feel like tremendously odd things to miss. The icons for towers are extremely indistinct, pardoning a few, and their icons are all you have to go on at a glance. I don't really appreciate the lack of tooltips, as it feels like a Tower defense 101 level thing to be missing. You can pause and then open info there, but it's oddly out of place. Enemies have nothing to click on, whereas in most games you'll get a paragraph of description. It's especially problematic given enemies can be different tiers with different amounts of health or maybe different abilities? It's very strange. The game could largely use more information in general. It's a little strange, because the game is very good about camera and pathing - information about where enemies are going to go is cleanly presented, and you can pause / zoom / pan and spin around to watch the action form any angle, which often TD games don't let you do effectively.

Also, the tower defense maps early on are very small and a bit simplified, but that's mostly because of the big twist. They do improve later on, though I'm not sure you ever get to grind on the really interesting maps right at the end of the campaign, but maybe.

Prime World: Defenders, as I said, feels like a f2p game in some angles of its design. It is not, mind you, anywhere near as bad but there's a sentiment that they learned something from watching f2p games being played. Battles result in acquiring silver (the main currency) and XP. In some battles you get "stars" the elite currency and set battles give you a "try your luck" section at the end where you can pull cards, stars, silver or so on. As such, the game rotates a fair amount of its gameplay around tower and spell "cards", which aren't really cards but more like characters in a roster. You can level and "fuse" towers. Leveling increases their effectiveness, while fusing allows you to upgrade their tier in battle for larger costs as you see in most tower defense games. Both use a different process and different resources to do. Spells, as well, can be leveled and you also level which also costs currency to buy new talents, so on, so forth. There's basically an endless loop of leveling and fusing and forging and there's even a shop where you can allocate resources for other resources that can come randomized or are set to improve your fusing/forging. That's all a big muddling mouthful, but basically, the game has a ton of grinding.

Whether or not you like PW:D comes down to whether or not you want to play the game as a four hours at a time, serious game or as something you play a map or two of when you're drinking your coffee or eating lunch or whatever. The grinding section of the game is largely very easy but it's a major component, although it's laid out in a pretty generous way with lots of long term goals as well. You're always getting cards and silver to think about changing things up, and if you save up your silver or stars the big rewards are never that far off. Basically I wouldn't recommend it in the same way you play an ARPG, it's kinda mediocre when it comes to long sessions, but it is very diablolike in how obvious "the box" is.

The card system is well done though, and while as I said it's grindy, it's grindy in a neat way. It's not just a treadmill, you're given lots of decisions and you're rewarded for delaying gratification to perform bigger upgrades. There are common, rare and I think unique towers, which in turn is interesting since the system of upgrading can allow the common towers to max one element out quickly, returning them to relevance and creating some decisions. The one problem here is it is hard to tell if a tower is good when it's properly leveled against other towers, meaning you'll experiment a fair bit and "waste" time doing so.

Monster design is pretty limited, you have your usual suspects and that's your run. I think they hit about 90% of the monsters in defense grid with nothing new, except for the anti-stun monster, which is a neat idea. I actually found the anti-stun monsters really changed up how you look at the provoke mechanic. They're basically squishy and super fast, meaning as long as your towers focus on them, they die quite quick. But if they come in at the same time as the previous wave, you'll find they slip through. Sometimes the solution is to provoke early, giving the ghosts time to pull ahead of their peers so you can splatter them. It's a little thing, but it's a good example of how well the provoke mechanic worked in practice.

All in all, while the grinding is the key element of the game and how much you will or won't like it, it is a solid tower defense title that you can easily play here or there for a couple minutes at a time. I liked many of the ideas, and the variety of towers is top notch, better than almost any other game I can bring to mind. While monster design was a little boring, you do get boss fights, and the pre-battle placed totems you need to bring down added a good wrinkle to some maps. The randomization of the grinding maps is good too, you'd be surprised what removing 3 slots at random from a map but also offering you bonus power ups does to change how a map plays out.

Oh and the music was pretty great if limited in tracks too. Strangely epic for grinding on monster slaughter, but I liked it anyway. Still not the best TD game I've ever played, but a very solid entry into the genre and I would certainly be interested in a sequel with some of the issues cleaned up. Definitely one to pick up if you're keen on tower defense and like the idea of TD injected with leveling, talent trees and shops to buy things.