Buy Prime World: Defenders

I really wanted to like this game because of the whole tower defense thing and how nice the game looks, but it is VERY, VERY, poorly executed. It starts off fun for the first half... You get to upgrade towers and combine powers and unlock new abilities... All very nice...

BUT...

The baddies are in a constant state of "better than you can ever be" near the middle of the game. As you are upgrading towers, like in other tower defense games it should be EASIER to take out baddies so they just throw more baddies at you so you can then upgrade towers more, but in this game they not only throw more baddies at you but the baddies are near invincible and require HOURS AND HOURS of grinding to finally beat. Even with upgrades and such, the starting "prime" money/resources at the begining of each level is insanely low for the amount of powerful baddies that show up even in the first wave... The amount of prime you get from each kill does not go up with the difficulty increase and health increases the baddies get as the game progresses, so it makes it even harder to upgrade towers and such without pointless hours upon hours of grinding. Also, the types of towers that show up after the midpoint are completely random, so you may get some decent towers in a playthrough or you may never see those towers at all! It just feels like a poorly executed port from a mobile platform "free to play, but pay to win" type game at that point. I mean I had towers upgraded that could do 5000+ damage in a single shot and it couldn't take down the weakest swarmers.

I really cannot recommend this game because of the insane difficulty curve that spikes in at the midpoint of the game; it goes from being fun, to being a decent challenge, to being an automatic rage quit. Maybe I will revisit the game and give a better review if the devlopers ever fix the balancing issues. (DEVS? If you are reading this, play the game 'Defense Grid" that is how a tower defense game should be done.)

A blend between MTG and defense grid.
You can really play this game at your own pace, you can spend your time on creating a great defense strategy or just grind to get better towers, it's best to just do both.
This game is addiction oriented and has the fairness of a mario party game, but if you are tired and still crave that feeling of doing something, this game really does that...
If you want a more skill based TD game, play defense grid, if you are a perfectionist, play spacechem or gnomoria.

The game is a good bang for your buck. If you enjoy TD, and need a good 10 minutes of free time, this is the one to pick up. There are skill points, evolving towers, and an enjoyable card system. There is currency which allows you to buy random chance drawings at different tiers. The graphics are very good considering the price. The towers are not very balanced, but the tiered system allows basically three levels of rarity. The metascore is not a fair score. While there is some grind, that is kinda the point of TD games. You grind for better towers and skills. You can still progress far without having to grind as much, but you need to get at least 1 or 2 "pink" cards (tier 3) to really shine in grinding/progress.

I have about 50 hours in the iPad version as well which seems to be better in terms of log-in rewards but worse in terms of glitches/freezes.

One of the best tower defense games in steam at the moment.

Top graphics for the genre, good mechanics and twists, it has an interesting story and lots and lots of towers (and upgrades).

You use cards to defeeat the waves. Some of them are towers and some are magic. Towers/magic cards can be upgraded to 5/15 level using other cards via fusion. Towers can also evolve using 2 of the same tower cards to give the tower more power and that extra upgrade inside the stage (3 Upgrade levels). While this game looks like an android/ios game, the pc version is proper and I can say I enjoyed playing this in my big screen.


In each stage you need to farm so you can get more and better cards for fusion or evolution and in game currency for talents and while I've been doing this a lot, it never got boring. Stages are dynamic so that each time there are a few different positions you can set your towers.

All in all it is one of my favourite tower defense games and what makes it so good, is the abundancy of the towers and upgrades it has. Play it. You will love it.

This game is not without flaws, and your enjoyment of it can depend greatly on how you like it's mechanics. Most crucial among those is a progression system that allows you to level up your towers between missions through a collectible card system. You can buy additional cards as well as boosters with ingame currency (no microtransactions whatsoever in the steam version) and use those to evolve your towers, unlocking the ability to upgrade them during missions, or infuse them, making them more effective. Different tower cards also have different rarities, with some being straight upgrades from their common versions. This leads to the first major flaw with the game, as the card rewards for side-missions are random, leaving you hoping for a specific tower to drop because at some point in the game, about 10-12 story missions in, you will hit a brick wall of difficulty. Once you get the next 'tier' of basic towers properly evolved and infused it becomes easier again, but getting these towers is mostly a case of farming sidemissions in hopes that RNG will bless you with the right rewards. I feel the upgrade system worked well inherently, but adding tiers to the towers completely broke it.
Difficulty tends to be all over the place in general. For example, finishing the normal mode of the game unlocks a heroic mode and two extra long survival missions. But with the towers required to beat the last level I had zero difficulty in the survival missions, often mashing the rush button to send in more gits because my towers ground everything to paste from start to finish. The heroic modes also felt hugely dissapointing, as I was able to blitz all of them with next to no effort up to the last level, which I overcame with two retry's and a bit of tweaking the tower placements.
The missions themselves however, are well-built for the most part, with the only hiccup being the randomized levels you get for your sidemissions. The game essentialy re-uses previously finished levels and adds random buffs to some tiles and inpassable rocks to the other. This meant you couldn't rely on a single layout and had to adapt, which greatly increased their replay value. Admittedly it could benefit from removing the first few levels from the map pool, since they're so small you run out of things to build or upgrade halfway through the harder sidemissions and can only sit and cast the odd spell, waiting for the waves to inevitably overrun your defense.
The towers themselves start out rather bland with the basic all-round tower, the slow tower and the anti-air tower, but later tiers add some much needed variety, with the highest tier offering some interesting options to mix and match into all new ways to make the Touched's lives impossible.
The Touched is the generic enemy faction in this game and consist of a collection of fantasy villains like kobolds, ogres and trolls. The only remarkable enemy is the pink floating marshmallow... thing that occasionally teleports forward and suddenly sneaks past your defenses. No really, you'll know it when you see it... and then you'll rage.
The game has a story and a linear set of missions to follow along with that, but it's cringeworthy at best. There's no major twists, even if the game tries very hard to set one up for you. The voice-acting is mostly terrible, with a special place in hell for the short snippets played during the missions.

TLDR: the gameplay is good, but beware that the difficulty can spike wildly between missions and most of the times the only solution is to farm sidemissions. Also there's a story, but who plays tower defense games for the story?

I like tower defense games, but most suffer from a lack of originality or repetitive gameplay, or other things like lack of challenge/interaction. Prime World suceed as a 'prime' TD game on these points, the towers and spells are actually cards you can find, upgrade, combine, and so on, gaining new specifications everytime. How you play the game and customize everything can vary greatly from one game to another, as you may not find the same cards at the same moments. A must play in my opinion. i enjoyed myself. Oh and the game offer replay value with increased difficulty challenges and a form of new game plus where you can redo levels in harder modes.

-Lost

A mediocre tower defense game. There are much better on the market.

A spinoff of the mediocre MOBA, PW:Defenders is a decent enough tower defense game. A handful of maps become "randomized" with obstacles to change your strategy from play to play, but you will ultimately find a balance of towers to suit your play-style. The acquisition of cards/towers being the hardest part, involving lots of grinding and luck to get what you need. The crafting system is poorly explained, but with a little trial and error it can be figured out. Or look to the forums and guides to tell you the two important things the game doesn't tell you.

What killed the game for me is the constant bugs and sudden loss of data. Towers don't always hit their mark, bonuses are either not correctly applied or explained incorrectly, daily rewards and store offers disappear/reappear randomly, and achievements will stop functioning after a certain level. This prevents any further progress through Steam's system, though they can still be earned in game. Not long after losing the ability to gain Steam achievements my data was completely lost with no hope of recovery. Still not sure how that happened, probably an error on their server regarding saves.

Looking to the forums shows absolutely no further dev interaction, patches, or support. This is essentially dead software. If you are hoping for patches or fixes, either the community will have to find a work around, or you're ♥♥♥♥ outta luck. I bought this on sale for $2.00, and certainly got my money's worth out of it. Even if I didn't complete it. But at current full price of $10, it is definitely not worth it at all.

If you ever need to know what a real Tower Defense game looks like, try this one.

How many of you enjoy card collecting games like “Magic: The Gathering?” How many of you play “Defense Grid” and “Sol Survivor” religiously like your life depended on it? If you raised your hand to both of those questions, then there’s no doubt in my mind that you’ll take a liking to “Prime World: Defenders”. This game reminds me a bit of “BattleForge”, a card collecting real-time strategy game that I was heavily invested in for quite some time. In this case however, you’ll be collecting cards that will form your tower defense arsenal and be tasked with slaying mutants and baddies by the thousands.

Overall, I really enjoyed my experience with this game. I’ve thrown hours into this game and have been showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. “Prime World: Defenders” is an incredibly addicting game that I’m glad to see has brought something new to the tower defense table. Yes, it’s a bit grindy…but I’m finding it to be the good kind of grindy. I also want to praise the game for not including any sort of real money store or microtransaction system, which would be very easy to do in this particular type of game. Everything purchased in the game is done via coin, which you’ll be earning as you play. The mission generator (which you’ll see after the first few missions) adds almost unlimited replayability to the game. My only real complaint (if you could call it one) was that the combat and tower animations were a bit generic. While pretty, I didn’t feel “wowed” by the towers I placed or the enemies I saw…they just simply served their purpose. If you’re looking for the bottom line, then I’ll simply say that I highly recommend it, especially for the ten dollar price tag that it currently advertises.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2d2XsBdpOk

I just had to make a comment on this game after reading the other reviews and seeing that this game got a very low
Metascore.

Almost every negative post on this game complains about the "grind" yet has less than 10 hours total even played for the game. Yes, to get the "legendary" stuff in this game you must actually play the game!?!? A shocker, I know. To think the devs actually want you to play the game that you just got. Zzz...

Sarcasm aside, this game really is pretty fun. It blends TD, char lvling to gain new skills and also the collecting of cards to gain access to new towers and spells. You then sacrifice extra cards to towers you like to make them stronger. I honestly hope to see more games like this. This game is just as ground breaking to TD as Dungeon Defenders was. The addition of actuall loot in my mind is what makes it shine, but clearly other lazy folks don't agree and just thumbs downed the game without even trying. Granted I've only had it for 1 day but I've logged 10+hours in that time & can't wait till I wake up later to play it some more. As far as the metascore I really am stumped, this is the most fun I've had on a game in awhile and all for under $10. If it goes on sale again it's worth a look.

Fun casual Tower defense.

a great TD game. Colorful, fun towers, and a interesting card based upgrade path that would have been easy to add microtransactions to, but thankfully they have not. Bonus points for not being a crappy company.

ive playd this alot on the ipad and iphone. but if i knew it was on steam before i probobly would have had more hours playd :P
i like it.. its a fun intresting towerdefence game. time killer deluxe..
they should add a buy a four pack gift so i can get my friends on steam to play this :D

Metascore 58?! Are you kidding me? I just don't get it. My only complaint with this game is that it's too grindy at certain points, and with not so many maps it can make the experience somewhat repetitive. Aside from that, the upgradeable trading cards meets tower defense idea here works surprisingly well, and above all it's fun. If you're a fan of tower defense, I say go for it. It's one of the best in the genre (up there with defense grid, plants vs. zombies, etc.). 8/10

I am slightly conflicted in recommending this. On one hand, purely from a "tower defense" perspective, the gameplay is pretty solid. Everything works as it should and it is well-designed (nice interface, towers all serve specific purposes, enemy health, waves and routes are clearly indicated, etc). And most importantly, the actual gameplay itself is fun. What brings this down are the nonstandard elements the developers tried to introduce into the standard tower defense formula - specifically, the "card system" (and everything that comes along with it). There's nothing wrong with the basic idea - tower types are represented by cards that can be collected and leveled up, and you have to pick and choose a subset of cards from your deck before going into a level. Where the problem comes in is obtaining the cards you need you be successful and "leveling up" those cards. First of all, the leveling system is overly confusing and needlessly complicated. Secondly, in order to beat the later levels, you will need specific cards leveled up to adequate levels of strength. The problem with this is that most of the cards you get as rewards are random, so you could go a good long while without (or possibly even never) finding a Lightning Tower card, for example (which I would consider absolutely essential for beating the game). And even if you are lucky enough to get some good towers, the process of leveling them up takes serious time. You basically just need to keep grinding out optional levels to get extra cards that can be used to fuse/evolve other cards. And make no mistake, you are going to be doing some serious grinding. So, depending on your tolerance for grinding levels and ranking up things, that's how I would recommend you make your decision to buy this or not. Personally, I am the OCD-type who feels the need to level things up and complete stuff, so I forced myself through and eventually got enough cards of high enough strength to power through the main game, as well as the extra hard difficultly that unlocks afterwards. While I did enjoy the game overall, it did take a lot of time and effort to get the most out of it. To me, tower defense shouldn't be about making towers strong enough to win by brute force. It should be about overcoming the challenges using a set of predefined towers and nothing else except whatever strategy you come up with. The first half of this game can be played along those lines, but once you get to the later levels, you will absolutely hit a wall if you don't have certain cards leveled up to a certain strength. That's poor design in my eyes. But even with all that said, I honestly still had fun with this game, as it's well made and I have a semi-high tolerance for grindy things. If you think you can deal with the grinding issue and like TD games, definitely go for it. Otherwise, you may want to hold off or wait for a huge discount.

Lets start of by saying that i havent played a lot of tower defence games but if a fair few have the quality that this game does then i think i will be playing a fair few others.
When i started playing the game i was like "I really like the setting" (huge fantasy fan me) "but do i really like the style of gameplay that this sort of game has".
Then i watched as time went by and i realised this is exactally the sort of game i love to spend time with,the setting is pure fantasy and is well represented in game with the graphics,sound and script.
The game plays out from battle to battle and you gain coin and different cards that you can use in battles defending the entrance that the demons (from bouncing heads on sticks to exploding frogs-GO FIGURE) try to reach and if they do so in a certain number then its "GAME OVER MAN" (couldent resisit the quote there).
The cards are also used in between levels in upgrading the towers you have,and beleive me when i tell you that this plays a heavy part in the game as dont upgrade and you are not going to proceed any further than where you are at that certain point in the game.Grinding plays quite a huge role in the game and is an important part of being able to upgrade the equipment you have so you can get that one level closer to the finishing line and the demon who seems to want your head on a pole.
Like i have allready said i really liked the game and after playing for a while (havent quite finished just yet-but dont think it will change my opinion on the game as i will still regard it as a game i would reccommend to anyone with a love of tower defence games) then decided to buy another tower defence game (well the pack) ANOMOLY 2 and found that i really like that game also.
So sometimes it is good to play games you arent used to as you then find that sometimes a change can be just what you needed and that a game style you have never played before can get you gaming in ways you never thought you would.

This game feels suspiciously like a mobile IAP-based game that was translated to PC...

First though, the good -- the game looks very nice indeed for a tower defense game. Very high production values when it comes to visuals and overall presentation.

But back to the mobile app part -- unlike your typical tower defense game, which focuses on strategy and proper tower placement / usage, this one features a very heavy emphasis on grinding for permanent upgrades to your towers, which makes it almost as much of a hybrid RPG game as a traditional TD one. The game features a booster / upgrade store, and it is this part which feels distinctly like a remnant of a mobile port. As the levels progress, the same types of creeps gain increasing amounts of health, while the strength of your towers remains constant - thus the need to spend substantial amounts of time grinding previous levels for money to buy upgrades. One might imagine that a mobile version of this game would include the ability to buy these upgrades on the spot in exchange for real money...

I'm kind of ambivalent about whether or not to recommend this game. The hybrid TD-RPG concept can work well and be enjoyable, but in this case, I think my problem is mostly with the balance and unnecessarily high grind requirement.

Tower Defense crossed with a Card Collecting game; an unusual mix that strangely works well together. You have a set campaign of around 20 quests to complete before you, with some side quests you can do between main quests to gain further experience. There is some backstory to the whole game but its not overly interesting only appearing after winning certain levels. You use the drops, silver & stars earned from each win to upgrade your towers & magic, increase your deck size & obtain other perks.

Initial levels in the game are very, very easy to complete, making me think this might be a 'one session to complete' kinda game. Once you hit around level 10, the levels get much harder though. If you have been unlucky on the drops or have put your upgrades into tower cards you shouldn't have you can find yourself grinding out upgrades to get through the next level. This isn't overly frustrating though as the maps are randomly selected for each difficultly level & can have random modifiers to block certain tower squares from use. This adds new challenges for existing maps. There are also some unique boss levels where you have a set amount to build & take down a large enemy - those are fun!

There are a LOT of different towers you can build up in your deck. For tower defense veterans, most of the common suspects are there in some form (guns, flamers, slowers, long range), plus some other more unique configurations. Not sure exactly how many tower types there are but would estimate at least 20. The quality of the card determines how far you can upgrade, with each upgrade generally improving DPS/Range/Efficiency etc.

For those who like a strong mazing component to their tower defense, then this game might not be for you. There is some maps with a smaller level of mazing but most have a set path design. The strategic importance in PW:D is with your card selection to match the incoming enemies & what you put your limited upgrades earned towards. Better choices will make moving up the levels much easier (unlike my poor effort of a play through lol!), & bad choices will make the game feel next to impossible to beat.

The HD support (or lack of) I found a bit disappointing. Running PW:D in full screen ends up stretching the desktop down to 1280x720 - windows like the Steam window open in the background always get shrunk down & I need to resize. It looks fine at the lower resolution just a minor frustration. Again, a minor frustation I found was the menus between games. There is a lot of going in and out of different sections to get your upgrades done, check your towers etc. This could have been simplified to fit more cards on one page, and have main functions and browsing together to save going back and forth.

Overall, I have really been enjoying this one. Its a challenging & addictive tower defense game with a card twist! Lots of achievements & one that is well suited to load up for a quick 10-20min TD session.