Our Rating
The core gameplay of The Tower might get boring for the average person but the game features more than enough content depth to keep providing you with new things to do. Whether its the lab with its vast array of upgrades, or the workshop that unlocks new game mechanics every now and then. Unfortunately, the game does require a ton of premium currency to unlock bonuses that you absolutely need in order to progress.
Gameplay
Monetization
Content
With the perfect marriage of the Tower Defense genre with an incremental experience, The Tower provides a slow upward journey towards bigger numbers and higher doses of dopamine for you to enjoy. This game combines a minimalist art style with equally simple mechanics to provide you with an experience that traditional tower defense “idle games” simply can’t replicate.
Gameplay
The Tower focuses on providing you with a simple tower defense game where enemies can spawn from all edges of the screen and make their way towards the single central tower. Your health, damage, and everything else that you can imagine relies on this single entity in the middle of the screen that you must defend with all your might.
By avoiding the use of multiple towers, the developers have created yet another example of the age old phenomenon that when you limit yourself to a narrower scope, you end up creating a far better product than you would otherwise have built, more constraints lead to better innovation. Twitter used to be an excellent example of this with their limited tweet length but sadly we can’t use that as an example anymore.
Back to The Tower, the game has two core mechanics upgrade mechanics that new players will unlock fairly quickly. The Workshop and The Research Lab. By earning coins, players can purchase upgrades through the workshop, these upgrades are the same as the regular upgrades you purchase during a run, except that they essentially give you a head start without actually increasing the cost of upgrades in a run itself. Sounds confusing? Don’t worry, we’ll get you a guide for it.
The Research Lab also plays a crucial role, utilizing earned coins to unlock upgrades. Each upgrade requires a certain amount of time to complete, forcing you to eventually just put the game down as you wait for researches to finish. These upgrades serve to unlock new features and provide multipliers to existing attributes like damage and attack speed. Moreover, players can also invest in upgrades that accelerate the game speed, letting you get a sense of accomplishment as you watch enemies move faster towards your tower to destroy it.
In-App Purchases in The Tower
The Tower does make use of a Gacha mechanic, to give you cards that you can equip to power up your runs – but these cards can easily be obtained by watching the in-game advertisements. There is also a microtransaction to permanently remove all advertisements from the game, which is a great way to both save your time while also helping the developers make some extra cash upfront.
There is no need to purchase any other packs or diamonds from the store, but doing so will significantly speed up your progress.
Keep in mind that because of how idle games work, you are making the various walls and hurdles easier by purchasing these bonuses, especially the multipliers. So a 2x bonus will effectively make all progress twice as fast, halving the time you spend farming up coins for your bonuses.
