Taur Review

Taur describes itself as an action-strategy sci-fi game, but it feels much more like a tower defence game. In the most literal sense, you are a tower, you need to defend yourself. Simple, right? The twist is that you also have an arsenal of weapons at your disposal. Your ability to identify and shoot high-priority targets is essential to victory, as is the composition of the turrets and units you surround your central tower with.

Once you get the hang of things, it can be spectacular. But Taur can be punishing, and if you expected a casual tower defence experience you’ll be surprised. The game has a low poly style, but the special effects are really good for a small title and it makes excellent use of its visuals to provide clarity between enemy types.

The main focus is to complete missions; each mission grants you some resources that can be used to build more towers, do research, upgrade your units and weapons, or trade. You can tell how many you have completed by what the ‘day’ is. The final boss for the campaign normally appears on day 50, and then will keep reappearing after a set number of days until you have defeated it.

In the early game it will just be you with a couple of basic weapons and a few towers against a handful of enemies. By the time you beat the final boss, not only will your base be bristling with towers and guns, but you’ll also bring a small army with you. By the end game, you can wield a mass of guns, turrets, artillery, a substantial army, air force, auxiliary rebel forces, and even a capital ship to go toe-to-toe with a seemingly unending horde of enemies.

Your arsenal will expand to include guns (like a gatling gun and laser) through to an unguided missile and abilities like repair drones and slowing down time. These are complemented by the sound design, with appropriately sci-fi-sounding pews and some really good explosions. The music fits well but isn’t particularly memorable.

The game is lacking some features I’d like to see, like a skirmish mode where you have infinite resources and can fight whatever, wherever you want. The main and only mode is the campaign, which later becomes the ‘Infinite War’ once you have completed it (beaten the final boss). You’ll defeat the boss long before you unlock everything the game has to offer.

In terms of story, there isn’t much: it can be boiled down to the red and black robots want to absorb the blue and white robots into their empire. However, the blue and white robots are pretty awful at this whole warfare thing, despite having advanced weapons, so they have turned to an organic (the player) to show them how it’s done. This is all revealed to you in the opening of the game and isn’t really expanded on besides snippets describing each faction and the various weapons and unit types. Story is not why you’d play the game.

There is a very slight influence on gameplay, that being the trade interface includes three different factions which react differently to your victories or defeats, as well as the overall control over the planet you are fighting for. As an example, the rebel faction has the fairest prices, but doesn’t have much stock. But if you choose to bring rebels with you on a mission (and win) then they get an instant resupply of new Power Cores and Crystals for you to buy. Fortunately, this trade interface helps out a bit as it will automatically sell items you choose to the highest bidder.

Speaking of Power Cores, in order to build your forces and upgrade them, you will be managing three resources. Power is your run-of-the-mill currency, and then there are Power Cores and Crystals, both of which have three subtypes (all colour coded for our convenience). Every build slot needs to be unlocked with Power and the appropriate Power Core, and each building uses the same currency. The Crystals are purely a research currency. The split would be easy to define if it weren't for the later game options; the rebel and sentinel forces you can call in for backup require Power Cores and Crystals for their research and upgrades.

One of the more frustrating parts of the game is the limited selection of missions and mission rewards. I can’t tell you how many times I needed a particular size Power Core or Crystal for that new massive turret I wanted to build, only to play 10 missions before it popped up as a reward. Having my only other option being to spend my hard-earned Power to buy it through trade was frustrating. Admittedly, this is negated somewhat by exploiting the market with the systems described on the trade page or by using rebel forces on each mission to quickly give them a boost of available stock, but this feels like a stop-gap.

As you play the rewards do get larger but only up to a limit. Once in the ‘Infinite War’ the reward sizes are unchanging, which can make it feel like a grind when the upgrades and units at that time tend to be very resource-intensive.

Since the game’s initial release in 2020, it has been blessed with new maps, new enemies, new techs, difficulty settings, rebels, sentinels, and trade, as well as various bug fixes and balance patches.

Despite its flaws, Taur is a solid game with a very strong foundation. From what I can find out this is developed and published by Echo Entertainment, which appears to be a solo developer. It’s well worth checking out, especially if you are into tower defence games and want something that feels fresh or different.