GAME REVIEW: My Tower, My Home

My Tower My Home is a hybrid game that combines elements of tower defense with platform-style gameplay. As interesting as that sounds I’ll skip right to the punch with this one. This game was a bit of a disappointment. While there are some redeeming traits to this title my initial and lasting reaction can easily be summarized in a single word; incomplete.

Knowing that this title was came from an indie developer I tried to keep my expectations mid-range for this review. Developing a game is a monumental undertaking. I’m sure the developers worked hard to create it, but it feels as though they skimped out a bit in the finishing touches category.

In this game you have a tower and must defend it and as the player you control a guy with a gun who can run, jump, shoot baddies and build upgrades for your tower. Upgrades include various tiers of turrets, flamethrowers, and other fun toys. The game also lets you build wall sections to block enemies or act as platforms for torrents. This gives the player more freedom when deciding where to place defenses, which is a nice feature. You can unlock companion drones and other upgrades to help fight back the swarms. Building and upgrading costs money and you get money by defeating waves of enemies. This is pretty standard in the realm of tower defense. It works but nothing really new there.

The game does provide some depth, though it feels as though the developers didn’t go as deep as they should have in some areas. For instance, there is a level system that allows players to selectively upgrade various skills and bonuses to help as the game progresses. It is easy to understand and it adds to the fun factor of the game. It’s a smart feature to include because it gives the player options that have an impact on their strategy. You can choose options that buff your character or ones that increase how much money enemies drop. As such you can choose whether to deal with enemies head on or rely on your turrets and defense upgrades. It would have been nice had the developers expanded more in the part of the game as it seems like a step in the right direction.

As far as graphics are concerned, I found the visuals to be mediocre. Not the worst but not very impressive either. The game objects are rendered in as silhouettes. I’m sure the design intention was to create a certain atmospheric feeling but I would have enjoyed more interesting visual details on the enemies and objects personally. It almost seems like a design shortcut, though I am willing to subscribe to the logic that silhouette objects are a tad easier to process when the screen swarming with them.

Game objects aside, I was not overly impressed with the look and feel of the game’s UX. The menus and buttons were a bit clunky and unpolished looking. The turret placing process is sub-optimal and could be improved. Option buttons on the main menu are not accurately mapped to the cursor and that just demonstrates sloppy design. I experienced more than a few instances where I needed to click all around a button just to select it. This was especially true for the exit button, which actually had me chuckle a bit. Want to exit the game? You can’t!

In the gameplay department, this game does have its merits. It doesn’t take long to figure out, so points for conveyance. As it follows the classic run, jump, shoot, dodge gameplay one would expect in a platform game, it doesn’t take long to get right to it. I feel that the fun really comes from the tower defense mix-in, which is the core of this game. As far as game design goes I feel that it’s a pretty good core. I enjoyed the challenge of managing your defenses while shooting and dodging enemies. That being said, I find the problems with this game don’t actually come from the core. It comes from less than adequate quality assurance by the developers.

The number one issue I have with this game is that it just doesn’t seem finished. Not only did it crash almost every time I played it, but it would crash in multiple ways. As a PC gamer I am willing to suffer a few game crashes here and there but there is a line between having a few ‘unhandled exceptions errors’ and having an unstable game. I found it especially frustrating because there were moments I was very ‘into’ the game and it would crash. Total buzz killer. Instability issues aside, the game is unbalanced in some areas. For instance, you start with a machine gun and air drops in the game provide you with different guns. The guns you get from the air drop are random. I found that not all of them were better than your default weapon.

Eventually I started avoiding the air drops altogether because I didn’t see them as upgrades at all. Balanced gameplay and program stability are the sorts of things that developers should address before a game is launched. If this was an early access game I could see past these shortcomings, but such is not the case. The developers would have done much better had they focused more on quality assurance and testing before shipping this game.

While I cannot recommend this game in its current state I would encourage the developers not to abandon their efforts on this title. At its core there certainly is a good game here, but my end thoughts are that it needs more development to qualify as a good game entirely. I feel that a solid core concept deserves a high quality of delivery. I sincerely hope that the developers take this review as constructive feedback because I don’t feel that this game is a complete write-off.

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