Yrminsul

Neither a recommendation nor a unrecommendation.
A solid middle of the road game that can be better, give or take a few updates.
The games developers are French so the English translation is perfect but its good enough to know what is going on and what everything does. If you see a few mis-spelled words or things out of context just drop them a message on the steam forums.
Unlike traditional tower defense games, this one has a large world map filled with small skirmishes however each skirmish map is fought over and if you lose, you lose that part of the map until you conqeur it back again. I like the concept because your towers are persistant, so once your killing engine is in place you can then plant future turrets for future wars! This rewards forward thinking and also makes you think; "do I place a tower to deal with this problem here and now or do I plant a better turret for future battles?".
This is a regular tower defense game with a few puzzle defense stages thrown in as optional extras. A nice compromise and it shows a real love for tower defense games in general to include both types.
You can also gain the ability to upgrade towers (its complicated) but once you gain the ability, you can freely switch it around so I would re-enter a stage and upgrade tower type 1, leave, come back and upgrade tower type 2. A nice touch.
The game is overall okay, nothing offended me but a lot of things bothered me.
You get access to 4 skill trees however everything in all 4 trees unlock at exactly the same time and you are free to delve into all the trees at once. This makes it seem pointless, to seperate the trees and makes the gating system very apparent. What would have been better, would be if each tree had different unlocking tiers so I had more to look forward too as opposed to just grinding out till the next milestone.
You also never lose territory. I mean you can and will if you play the game the way its meant to be played but you can just alt-f4 out of a lost battle and poof, you are free to lose as much as you want. It kind of defeats the purpose in my opinion and you can also quit a losing battle and reload your save game from the regular in game menu anyway. I don't feel like I am struggling against the forces of good, because I am free to cheat my ass off anyway.
Okay, you got me, I hear what you are saying, its my own fault if I cheat right? Well remember those gated skill trees? You need to own so much territory to unlock more skills and the skills are, you guessed it, more and better towers. So losing territory is really a set back both in terms of the games narrative but also you as the player. You get nothing new to look forward too until you hit x territories so if you lose even 1, it may have a chain reaction as you lose all the connecting islands too and you are right back to winning them all back with nothing new or interesting going on in the meantime. To put it a simpler way, lets take Sonic the Hedgehog. Lets say you die in scrapbrain zone and that sends you back to greenhill zone act 2. Its needlessly annoying, oh and we take away any chaos emeralds you found beyond greenhill zone as well.
Other niggles with the game come from balance. A lot of the early towers are really quite pants and you are stuck with them for longer than you would probably like. While you wait for the more exciting towers you try using the not so good towers in different ways but nothing changes the fact that they just suck. Enemies move fast, even the slowest of the slow monsters still move fast so when you have a tower that attacks every 10 seconds and a large, high HP monster whom only gets hit by that tower twice, well you lean towards faster attacking towers, naturally.
The game does limit where you can place towers so it is closer to a puzzle defense game but most of the early towers feel so rubbish that I just used the two towers you start the game with in addition to the starting spell up till about tier 3. Not even the slowdown tower was worthwhile because it only slowed 1 target at a time and even worse, the slowdown wears off! And even worse still upgrading the tower increases the enemy slowdown, naturally, but it also increases the refire rate so upgrading the tower makes it worse not better!
The same can be said for most of the later towers as well because anything that hits slower than 5 seconds will only hit a mob once and I have limited space for these towers anyway so it's not efficient to use anything slow.
There is a spell that makes a tower shoot faster...But it has a cooldown on it because of course it does. Make it a passive and a lot of the towers would become viable.
Overall I'd like to sit down with the dev team and tweak the towers, make autosave either happen during the game or as soon as a fight starts with a 'you lost' flag on it until you win and the flag changes and rejiggle the skill tree and then i'll be happy.
Everything else with the game is fine and I have no complaints and the presentation is pretty top notch on this one.
If you love tower defense games, I actually find it harder to recommend this game since it will drive you up the wall, however if you are new to tower defense games then this one is okay.
I also found it a nice touch that you can kill the wildlife for money. Oh thats right, we play as the bad guy in this game and whilst it does the cliche thing of 'we are bad so we do bad things, of course' I liked the fact that they allow us to freely kill wildlife with no prompt or encouragement and that it can be beneficial to do so as well. A good example of meta-storytelling.
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The thing that most intrigued me about Yrminsul was the area control mechanic. I have to say that I really liked this mechanic since it really makes you feel like you are becoming more powerful in the game. As you gain control over more areas you get more abilities and can build more towers. This works well with the story of you playing as the bad guy that is trying to take over the world. While the game starts off a little slow, it started to grow on me as I built up my empire and became more powerful.
The biggest problem I had with the game is that other than the area control element, Yrminsul plays like every other tower defense game. If you like tower defenses you will probably like this but if you don't care for the genre you probably won't like Yrminsul.
The other problem I had with the game is that at times there are some areas that I wish were a little more polished. The first couple days I played the game, some of my saved games disappeared for some unknown reason. This problem seems to have corrected itself when I last played the game though. It is also way too hard to click on the small and fast enemies which is important for a lot of the special abilities in the game. Finally I don't think the game gives you enough time to collect the infamy dropped from enemies.
If you like tower defense games I think you will enjoy Yrminsul. It is not the best tower defense game I have ever played but I still had fun with the game.
Note: I received a review copy of the game from the developer but received no other compensation for this review.
Read My Full Review

I've always liked tower defense games so I picked this one up when it was released. I never heard of it before and it had no ratings so it was a bit of risk. I've played it for about half an hour and it seems like its going to be a nice little time killer game. The upgrade system is decent, the story is fine (for a tower defense), and it seems like it requires a nice bit of strategy to play without being overly complicated. The UI is just a little clunky and they throw a lot if tutorial information at you right away, but that's not too big a deal. Nice little tower defense game.

An interesting take on the tower defense genre. It's fun. It's a good way to kill some time when you're looking for a quick TD match or two.

Nice tower defense -- just started, but graphics are good and the writing / plot is decent, too! I like the skill tree aspect, and the tutorial-ish levels (so far the only ones I've played) were understandable without being super tedious.

A simple tower defence with some nice features like ambush and persistent maps. If you whant a casual TD game this is for you.

GAME SUMMARY
Yrminsul is a tower defense with a unique overworld/conquest mechanic. With the conquest mechanic you are challenged to 'aggressively defend' new worlds to gain power and unlock upgrades. It features 3D graphics for tower defense battles supported by 2D art for interstitial screens, including some comic-like story art.
THE GOOD
-Passable tower defense.
-Passable story.
-Unique overworld/conquest mechanic.
-Built towers on early stages remain in later revisits.
THE BAD
-Upgrade system is heavily gated on progression. Some levels containing powerful core upgrades are pretty much impossible in the early to mid game.
-Dialogue in the tower battle screen is very slow and must either be endured or skipped completely (no next line, as available in other screens).
-The 3D graphics are quite poor and not what I'd expect from a game in 2016, they do a disservice to the 2D art style which is otherwise acceptable.
VERDICT
Some interesting ideas but nothing revolutionary here. I'm going to give this a passing rating though I neither recommend nor do not recommend this game. This game will likely only entertain a very small subset of players but there is a fresh idea or two in a genre that is mostly chiseled in stone at this point. I got this in a bundle. I would recommend trying to do the same or picking it up on sale if possible just in case it doesn't tickle your fancy.