Idle Tower Defense Review

The idle or incremental genre is a bit of a strange concept. Possibly the most casual form of gaming to ever exist and with that being said, possibly one of the dullest forms of gaming to ever exist too.

Idle Tower Defense is a free-to-play title that blends the familiar genre of a tower defence game with the idle games genre. If you have played the likes of Cookie Clicker or Clicker Heroes, you might have an understanding as to what an idle game might be. Essentially, an idle game is one that involves simply clicking over and over again to defeat an enemy, to then collect currency to upgrade your character, giving you stronger attacks, culminating in less overall clicks.

I can just about understand the concept of both Cookie Clicker and Clicker Heroes. You physically have to click on an enemy to kill it and sometimes frantically to kill some of the higher levelled bosses. Idle Tower Defense however has absolutely no clicking at all. It is basically a tower defence simulator. Enemies come at you in waves and are sent along a route, across the map. You have to strategically place towers to stop them in their tracks. Defeating an enemy produces gold coins that in turn, can be spent on even more towers or upgrading existing ones.

The main objective is to stop the enemy wave from making it across the map. If this does happen though, there is no penalty, the wave simply restarts. Couple that with the fact that enemy units can’t even attack your towers, which really gives Idle Tower Defense a very laid-back feel.

However, there are two features that truly make this game the most casual game that I have ever played: the ‘Farm Wave’ and also ‘Offline Gold’. If you don’t have enough gold to place down another tower, you can initiate a ‘Farm Wave’ that sends out loads of enemies with lower health to kill and accumulate gold. The real kicker though, is ‘Offline Gold’. I picked up the game after a few hours of not playing, to find that I had around seven million in gold to spend. Seven million, for doing nothing!

After getting past the fiftieth wave, you are offered the choice to prestige and move to a new map. It was incredibly tedious to get to this stage. The same enemies coming at you over and over again. Then to find out once you do prestige, you lose all of your towers and gold and then have to go through the whole rigmarole again, really left me deflated.

Each tower is unique, with their own individual special attacks and abilities. Some in the shape of mythical creatures such as giants and golems, but then there are also some random modern towers chucked in too, like a tank and various gun turrets. This kind of throws off the actual theming of the game itself. The same can be said for enemy units. Some are based in the fantasy genre while others are futuristic and science fiction based. The character models are pretty boring and uninspired, as well as the maps being completely devoid of anything interesting.

Overall, it’s hard to find many plus points about Idle Tower Defense. The gameplay is dull and lacking. No real penalties make the game grow old pretty quickly. The graphics are unexciting and tiresome and the whole theming of the game, just feels a little disjointed. However, if idle games are your kind of thing, go for it, but I believe there are much better titles out there such as Clicker Heroes and Time Clickers, that are far more rewarding in terms of gameplay.