I wanted to like this game; I really did. The BASE difficulty and combat depth is solid, the content has enough variety in enemies and items to not feel repetitive, and the art/music is great. The story is fine. But the pacing and higher difficulty levels, man! Even after the latest big update/overhaul (which is when and why I bought the game), I now keenly understand why people complained about too much repetition. It doesn't matter if battles are challenging or easy; after playing through about 30 battles over 9 hours, I was READING A BOOK while letting battles play out on auto-pilot. (Easy is fine sometimes, but I want to be engaged!) A good chunk of the game's complexity and engagement is playing as a hero/commander alongside your troops, but when I'm hacking at a ram for a good 2-3 minutes in a Defense mission, left-clicking non-stop... well. That ain't fun. Or take another example: a "Hold the hill" mission type. Fun, right? You hold for X minutes. Except higher difficulty means the "X minutes" becomes upward of 15 minutes with no input needed from you because a turtle formation + catapults does just dandy. (This is where I read a book.) Higher difficulty in general? Enemies multiply AND become HP sponges, forcing either the meta shield wall turtle strategy, or burning tons of resources to chuck endless troops of your own out to die, both options of which are... not very stimulating to manage. In short, this game suffers from unimaginative difficulty scaling (which is practically necessary to go up for for operating cash) which causes boredom, dovetailed with too few tactical options or viable strategies to maintain engagement. There is ONE army composition/tactic that outshines all others: shield wall + 1-2 healers + catapults + whatever flavor of DPS support (berserks, pyros, archers, doesn't matter). Enough said.
This game hits just the right notes in so many ways. Pacing: a run will take about 15 minutes, with no boring stretches. You're constantly, frantically juggling combat and resource gathering. Difficulty: I almost never lose a Normal match, often lose Hard, and I haven't yet accrued too many permanent bonuses. Content: I've only unlocked a third of the cities (i.e., starting base layouts and perks) and maps, and I've dumped in more than enough time already to justify the price. There's also a plethora of apparent strategies to build up to with an abundance of different tower types, and each city has its own significant twist to alter those strategies and/or add another calculation layer. It doesn't hurt that the art and music are solid, either! I'll be playing this for a long while.
