I’m slowly but surely coming around to the tower defense genre. I loved X-Morph: Defense earlier this year, for example. That does not, however, mean that I’m going to instantly like every tower defense game under the Sun. Evil Defenders still had to prove its worth to me. But did it succeed?
Kinda.
I’m going to get my main issue out of the way first, because it permeates throughout the entire game like a plague. Progression is ridiculously slow. I can only assume that this is down to the fact that Evil Defenders is a port of a mobile game which originally had micro-transactions strapped into it. It feels like they’ve simply pulled the option to buy upgrade points on Switch and failed to do any re-balancing to account for this fact.
This makes the entire game a tedious grind. It took me over 8 hours of playtime to complete 20% of the game. If this is the standard for tower defense games, then I don’t want to invest time in others going forward. JRPGs at least have an engaging story to carry you through insane amounts of playtime, but level after level of the same enemies and the same towers with incredibly minor upgrades is not enough to keep me invested for 40+ hours.
Further adding to this issue, is that your in-game currency (the souls of departed foes as far as I can tell) used for permanent upgrades, is also used to pay for rewinding rounds in levels. So if you get blindsided by an enemy type you weren’t expecting, you can pay to go back and tweak your setup. This is great, as you don’t have to do the whole level again. Except you do, because it’s more expensive to rewind to later rounds. You’re better off seeing it through or restarting from scratch to save the tiny amount of currency you get.
And I’ve not even mentioned that the towers are way too expensive to purchase yet. You get a gold budget in each level which is increased when you defeat enemies. I immediately invested my upgrade points so that enemies dropped as much extra gold as possible, and I still failed to bolster my towers to their maximum the majority of the time. I only managed it when returning to previous levels for “funsies” that I was massively over-prepared for.
So yeah, I’m not keen on Evil Defenders. It’s difficult in a way where only trial and error or endless grinding can save you. You could spend forever experimenting to find a strategy that works consistently, but that would take, well, forever.
BUT, it’s not all bad. Everything that doesn’t involve the difficulty steep incline is pretty good. The stage variety is solid for one thing, with most levels introducing a new stage gimmick that you can trigger. These can range from creating a literal firewall across the stage to simply preventing reinforcements arriving.
There’s a wide range of towers at your disposal as well. You have 5 base classes, but they can each be upgraded into several variants. Shame it costs a butt-load to upgrade that far, but still, it’s nice to have so many choices. Similarly the upgrade tree has plenty to choose from. I’d always bee-line to the “make tower cheaper” option, of course, but you can prioritise tower health, damage, crit. chance, defense, speed, health regen, you name it.
Again though, this is held back by the fact that it tends to be a 5%-10% increase tops, and it costs hundreds of your upgrade souls for one upgrade out of the hundreds available. And if you want to re-spec your upgrades, you have to sacrifice a portion of your currently invested points to get them back. I wish I could stop coming back to this, but everything in the game practically screams “micro-transactions,” and it makes me feel ill.
OK, I’m gonna mention a few final positives before concluding this review, as thinking about the time I’ve spent on this game makes me upset. The character designs are cartoony and fun; I especially liked the skeleton warriors. The skeletons were also my favourite towers as when they were upgraded to knights, they became a wall to hold back opponents while my archers could pick them off. It does feel good to stumble across tower combos that synergise well.
The music is also really good. It’s upbeat and lively, which is much needed when most of the game is spent sitting and waiting. The inclusion of god powers (lightning, teleports, and summoning an indestructible demon) does give you more to do fortunately. Unfortunately, they’re practically necessary and require quick reactions to use effectively. Good luck doing that while running the game at 4x speed. Take it slow or suffer the consequences.
Last thing I liked though, is that the game controlled really well in handheld with full touch-screen controls. Much better than on the TV where I’d have trouble picking specific tower spots with the joysticks. Granted, this is almost certainly down to the fact that it was made for mobile first. But still, credit where it’s due. Touch controls are spot on.
Regardless, I immensely disliked the game. The absence of micro-transactions and worse, the absence of re-balancing to account for that missing option, makes Evil Defenders a tedious chore to play. I had problems with the progression from the offset, but I only realised the likely cause of the issue upon researching for this review today.
There’s also the (in my opinion) misleading store page, which cites the game as having 90 levels and 6 difficulties. In reality, it has 15 unique maps playable at 6 difficulties, for a total of 90 levels. I also tremendously doubt that there are 60 towers unless you’re counting every single upgrade stage as an individual tower.
Overall, I’d carefully consider if you’ll enjoy Evil Defenders before purchasing it, considering its free-to-play roots hold it back in my personal opinion. Which is a real shame. Tweak a few numbers in the player’s favour and you’ve got a solid tower defense game here. Instead you’ve got hours and hours of grind to look forward to if you want to so much as see the ending on even the lowest difficulty. But hey, if you want a time-waster to waste a LOT of time, Evil Defenders is perfect.
A digital copy of Evil Defenders for Switch was provided by the developer.
Find Evil Defenders on Switch here: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/evil-defenders-switch/