I have previously talked about my fondness for Tower Defense games but in the context of being a sign that my ADHD symptoms were not being properly dealt with. My fondness for the genre might have been pushed to even more ridiculous levels if I had a PC since there were 100s of titles released for Windows. I know that for many people it would be more interesting to read through the synonyms for tedious than actually play a TD game but I have played many Tower Defense titles through the years (mostly on iOS) and my current favourite is Core Defense.
What is Core Defense
Core Defense is an attempt to merge gameplay elements from the Roguelike genre with Tower Defense. Like most TD games, Core Defense gives you access to a set of turrets that you place on walls in a 15 x 7 grid. At each corner is a portal from which enemies will emerge during each round. The walls redirect your opponents and also serve as the foundation you us to place turrets.
Unlike some pathbuilding TD games, the granularity of the game space is very low and so it is difficult to build twisting paths as you can in some other Tower Defense titles. Compared to a game like Fieldrunners 2, the paths you build in Core Defense are quite limited which stops you relying on a complex path to win the game. And you can’t modify the placement of walls during a run which means that you really do have to ensure that your turrets are as effective as possible.
Each turret is either an offensive weapon, like the Sniper, or a defensive emplacement like the Shield Generator. As with most TD games, there is a central target that your opponents are trying to destroy that you have to protect through 50 waves of attacks. Each wave gets tougher as they go on and you need to upgrade your turrets as you go through each wave. Succeeding in a wave (surviving until there are no opponents) gives you one upgrade, having no damage to your Core gives you another and if you don’t damage any opponents you get a Pacifist bonus upgrade.
The weapons you start with and the upgrades you get are random. You start the game picking from a set of turrets and upgrades and then get from one to three each wave. At some point, around wave 25 or 30, the game stops offering you new turrets so you have to balance getting new weapons and buffs with upgrading the ones you have to deal with the increasing difficulty of each subsequent round.
Turrets and upgrades also have a rarity (common, uncommon and rare) which are color-coded. So at the end of each round you get to pick from three upgrades or turrets each of which have varying rarity.
Unique features
Core Defense has a few features that I think help make it stand out from the rest of the current crop of Tower Defense games. The upgrade system helps make every game distinct. There are also upgrades for the game state itself. So you can increase the number of options you have at the end of each round, increase the appearance of uncommon or rare items or increase the number of each type of upgrade a turret can have. The Melter has three different upgrades, one of each rarity, and the number of times you can apply each upgrade is capped.
The Shield Generator only has two, one to increase the amount of shields generated and another to increase the speed at which it generates shields, and notably has no way to increase the range it works at. Each weapon is different not only in what it does but also in the number and type of upgrades it can get.
The game includes other upgrades, such as Common Stack, that increase those values letting you add more of each rarity if you want to focus on a smaller number of turrets in a run. These upgrades are at a higher rarity value and so you might not see them in every run.
Core Defense is also designed so that you can play to win via a Pacifist condition that means you have to survive each round by not actually destroying any of the opponent units. And yes, it is quite difficult.
And unlike other TD games, Core Defense has no preview of what is going to be coming in the next wave (you can eventually change that though). So when you select upgrades and built your defences you don’t really know what is going to be coming at you.
So why is it so darned good?
Core Defense turns around the economy of Tower Defense titles by removing the monetary rewards for destroying units that most games have and instead pick upgrades from a random selection. There are anywhere from 10 to 40(ish) upgrade slots for any turret so the capabilities of your turrets are going to vary considerably from game to game. There are no set stages of turret upgrade and no set starting set of standard turrets. This roguelike addition changes the dynamics of each run making it a more interesting game to come back to each time.
Building a workable defence in the game is also difficult since even the walls you need to build a path aren’t always guaranteed to show up with each set of upgrades and some upgrades will even increase the number you get. One game you could have more than 50 and the next you are lucky to get 25. In some TD games you can do your first few moves, or even the first few minutes, of the game by rote since you know what is coming, what resources you have and what your best play is. That isn’t the case in Core Defense. You don’t know what turrets you will get or when you will get them. And it is this second issue, the when, that can dramatically change your game.
In this screenshot I’ve done an overlay to more easily show the area of effect of the Disruptor tower. In Core Defense the Disruptor stops enemy units from activating their abilities which means no shooting, healing, spawning etc. I have a significant area of the board covered by the Disruptor but I could only do that because I was able to pick the Disruptor early on in the game and I also received a large number of its uncommon range upgrades.
Core Defense has a difficulty setting system that you need to progress through 30 different levels. The units get faster, their ranged fire becomes more effective and your Core gets fewer health. It becomes quite difficult to win as you progress but the system is very well tuned and while you keep getting challenged, those challenges are attainable.
The game also has a Mastery system, which is a paid upgrade, that rewards you points based on a cumulative score as well for beating each difficulty level after 20. You can use these points to change the game including adding a preview of each new wave, slowing your enemies down and even removing spawn points from the game. You can also have multiple Mastery settings so you can build them for a particular type of game, like Pacifist, or change the spawn points and the location of your Core to allow you to try out different types of pathing and defence building.
Roguelike games are popular because they can take a simple process or gameplay system and make it interesting by changing the dynamics of it by the introduction of random elements. Tower Defense games are usually seen as dull and tedious because, frankly, many of them are because the only real change in gameplay is to make the game more difficult. If you play the Curious Gorge level of Fieldrunners 2 a number of times the only real challenge is to make the level more difficult or to try new builds. Core Defense tilts that on its head and makes the game different each run without having to make it more difficult and without the player having to artificially manage the difficulty on their own.
Core Defense is available on Android, iOS, Steam and Itch.
The developer also has a new game that they are working on called Blacken Slash that is a roguelike TTRPG that has a Tron vibe.
Pile of dice 
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