Tiestru Review (PC)

Tower defense games used to be maps that explored different gameplay experiences in bigger games, but since the days of WarCraft III glory, they evolved into a full-fledged genre. That's how we got Tiestru.

Many people are kind enough to overlook the fact that they're essentially much easier to make real-time strategy games, and the fact that they're also playable on tablets saw the genre rise, occupying its rightful place among the subgenres under the strategy umbrella.

Unfortunately, there are several design hurdles that you have to jump over when making a tower defense game. The game formula usually allows little room for error and is based on the assumption that you'll play the game until you learn what to build where and when, without encouraging experimentation and enabling different strategies to be employed.

Another big problem is the legendary Maginot Line, not to mention Sun Tzu's advice to "let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night," which is rendered moot by the stationary nature of your defenses.

Gameplay

As there is no story whatsoever, you jump into the game without knowing whom you're fighting or why, which is pretty important in order to establish a general mood, even as far as purely mechanical games go.

You don't have any goals aside from killing orderly enemy troops before they reach your core crystal and kill it. In order to prevent them from doing so, you have to construct a network of towers that will shoot them down, showing the valiance only stationary defensive buildings are capable of.

This might not sound as bad if you never played Starcraft, and some people even managed to shake things up and make everything more interesting than that old map that started it all in that faraway era, when all serious gaming took place on PCs.

Unfortunately, developer Warlock Arts did not. The game is overly simplistic and shows a serious lack of dedication and depth, as all the towers look the same and all enemies are similar and recycled in an uninspired manner.

You have several types of towers, as the genre's core tenets dictate that you should have an all-purpose tower that will be the bulk of your "army" in the beginning phase, aided by a slowing tower, and then followed by various other types that deal heavy damage to organic or armored units.

Nice to see you again, Warcraft 3 era boxes

The tower defense mantra is finding the right mix of low-damage area of effect towers and high-damage single target towers, with varying shooting speeds, interspersed with various utility ones for slowing, lowering damage or increasing vulnerability to a certain type of damage, followed, of course, by turrets specialized in dealing said type of (usually elemental) damage or dedicated anti-air towers.

In Tiestru's case, things start out potentially interesting, but get stale really fast. Although the maps are pretty big and you would initially think that you would get to build a proper maze, you'll go through most levels with only a handful of towers, not nearly enough to have a satisfying maze by the time you reach the end.

Monsters spawn at a set location and then head for your main building, with only the most basic and atrocious of AI to guide them. They don't have a pre-set route, so you do get some freedom when it comes to setting up your base, but that doesn't help much.

The lighting towers look just like the fire ones, and the ice ones are only different in color, as are pretty much all the others. That makes things a bit difficult to discern, taking into account the fact that you can stack towers on top of each other.

In addition to this, the developer slipped in a new mechanic where some towers need to be "charged" in order to function properly. Since charge can only travel through towers of the same color, you have to be careful when setting up shop, in order to make sure that you do get the effect, as it's not that easy to interpret the clumsy manner in which it is highlighted.

Then there are the controls. Apart from having barely any option toggles, including no way to tone down the audio, the game also has horrendous camera controls that will make you wonder whether it was ever tested.

It's difficult to get in the right position to place towers in some cases, and nearly impossible to get the perfect view of the action.

Unfortunately, the flow of gameplay itself is on a similar page, with enemies clumping together and the limited number of towers you will be able to build not doing much to help the pain. It's just a garbled mishmash of mechanics that unfortunately don't add up to much.

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Visuals and sound

The music is fitting, but that only happens because everything else is lackluster, so hearing what you would expect from a cheap and quick mobile TD game, a generic and uninspired, not to mention very repetitive score, seems perfectly adequate.

The visuals are similar in scope, being quite dated and simplistic. Not bad, just what you would expect from a room in a dungeon in Diablo 3. The only bad part is that the room is the entire playground, so you don't get to see hundreds of them and thus the scenery doesn't have the variety that would excuse its pedestrian nature.

The animations and effects are of a similarly low quality, and seeing the same monsters stacked on top of each other, with little chance to distinguish between opponent subtypes, makes for an unsatisfying experience.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion