Monster Outbreak

Super close call. The mixed reviews are pretty accurate.
All the bad:
First off, you can't save in the game, and the games are super long, so I left my computer running for about 4 days straight. I haven't played for 120+ hours; I've probably played around 10, but my computer has been running it for that long. I understand why they didn't implement a save feature—it's difficult. As a programmer, I get it.
It's quite buggy. Enemies get stuck, and their attack range can sometimes extend halfway across the map. This happens maybe five times in a long playthrough, requiring you to dive-bomb them. On the second map, a UI popup appears around level 20 and can't be dismissed. The towers sometimes just cost wood, which is nice but clearly a bug. I stuck with the first map to avoid this. Additionally, the hitboxes of grass and flowers were glitchy, which was frustrating.
There are some goofy choices. The grinding aspect to unlock towers is excessive. You have tons of resources that can't be used until towers are unlocked. There's a useless pet that follows you around, which seems like a waste of development time. The zoom doesn't go out far enough, and in two-player mode, you can get attacked from just off the screen, leading to unavoidable hits. Most hits are avoidable, but some later attacks are impossible to see coming, forcing you to constantly eat to recover.
The controls are hard to get used to. They didn't map all the controls for two players, but you can work around that. Building snapping to the grid feels jumpy, and you can't build on edges where it looks like you should be able to.
The good:
Despite all that, it's still fun. It looks nice. While you can play most of the game in a few hours, there's potential for replaying and unlocking things forever if you want to.
Local coop is a big plus. It's one of the few two-player tower defense games out there.
I enjoy the resource gathering for some reason.
Most of the combat seems fair, and most of the bugs don't break the game most of the time.
In conclusion:
If it looks like a game you'd like, maybe give it a try.

Based on a free review copy of the game (1.0.6, Sept 27 2022). Played on KB/M
Overall - At the $12 sale / $15 retail price point, it's a thumbs up for anyone that is a fan of the visuals and genre. It needs a QOL pass for some issues but the core of the game loop is solid. If you don't care about the artwork or aren't a diehard fan of the Monster-Quest-Builder style hybrid tower defense genre, I'd probably wait for the first post-release patch.
Pros
- Nice golden sun type pixel art + animations. You can tell the artists were having fun.
- Good music, not too repetitive so far (a common downside of small studio pixel games)
- Tower elements are fun when you get them going and actually use them (See con about bosses)
- The starter towers give some interesting placement puzzle elements, and handling combat utilizing your towers and your character combined is fun.
- Lots of upgrades to choose between, but you'll have to find elemental resources within a given mission, so you're rewarded for having a variety of types available to you.
Cons
- It's frustrating to place buildings sometimes, a little more mouse aim would be nice rather than it relying entirely on your character's position. (On that note, if you're using MKB or dual analog controls anyway, make my character's facing independent of their movement if that isn't meant to be a core mechanic a-la Vampire Survivors)
- Repairing small things sucks, fences especially.
- The bosses. They're neat designs by and large, but suffer from the fact they more or less invalidate any sort of tower defense you set up by virtue of just destroying everything instantly. I get you're meant to fight yourself as much as utilize the towers, but there's no point in doing things like mazes or building walls when the hardest wave ignores them. Your most efficient designs are basically building defenses out in the open, then kiting monsters in front of them.
- Sprite animations can block shots/interaction/etc. This can be frustrating when using the bow, for example, as dying monsters stop your arrows from hitting living ones.
Other Notes
- I could use some direction between tutorial and first mission/endless/etc. I think you have to do them each one at a time but there's just no description of what each is that I can find.
- It's unclear how the end of game mystery chests work. They say you have to beat level 10 to open them, but games end at level 10? Unless you're just not meant to open them during missions.
- Do resources respawn? There's some play pattern in missions where you want to harvest the whole island before starting wave 1 anytime there's a "wave 0" pre-event.
- It's unclear you have to equip unlocks, maybe autoequip newly unlocked items?
- It feels a bit weird (unintentional i'm sure) to gate non-white player avatars behind gold, maybe start with a few very basic unlocked?
- Some upgrades *feel* like they cost a lot, especially since you still need to have the proper materials to build a given tower. You don't get so many resources early on that you're going to build more than 1-2 elemental towers at best, and that'll be close to the end of the mission. e; After having played a bit more, it isn't too grindy for the first big unlocks. You get a lot of gold from the quests. Later unlocks might be moreso after you've exhausted the burst.

The game is fun !
It's a different take on tower defense, and you unlock more stuff by playing, the game also has multiplayer so you get to play with a friend which is even more fun
I like the idea of having to gather resources between waves, and building you base differently depending on the terrain, you get to try to make the enemy AI pathfind to the deadlier part of your defense
There is character customization you can even dress up as a cooked chicken, or customize your little dragon
Since it just came out the game still needs a bit of polish around the edges but they developers said they are working on it and already released 2 patches for it,
What i would like to be added is the ability to shoot diagonaly, a̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶a̶l̶s̶o̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶t̶r̶o̶l̶s̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶m̶e̶n̶u̶s̶ ̶s̶o̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶s̶w̶i̶t̶c̶h̶ ̶p̶a̶g̶e̶s̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶k̶e̶y̶b̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶e̶n̶u̶s̶.̶ (Menus are now consistent)
Otherwise as i said the game is cool and i recommend it
O̶h̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶l̶s̶o̶ ̶i̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶d̶e̶z̶o̶o̶m̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶v̶i̶l̶l̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶s̶o̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶!̶ (There is a dezoom option in the menus now)

I don't understand the downpour of negative comments from people that are shown to have played this game for around an hour or even less. It's obvious that they haven't even gotten to the parts beyond tutorial level combat to have experience what it is about. And the game is about using your skill, upgrades and tactics for defending. The complaint about the combat system being clunky is absurd. That's the positive aspect of the game. It's about setting up the traps and using the environment to your advantage, not rely on swiping away at the enemies. The sword and bow are for aiding the setup, not being the main weapon.
Positives:
+ amazing pixel graphics
+ you can unlock new character looks
+ spend coins earned through gameplay to upgrade your equipment
+ decide if you want to spend the coins to unlock new maps instead
+ tons of achievements
+ a plethora of enemies
+ the traps are fun to use
Negatives:
- there's a mishmash of different art styles in the cutscenes, while nicely done it seems off for some reason
- there could be a little more hints on what to do early in the game after the tutorial is done
Overall, the game is solid. I highly recommend it.

I've played the game up to the first boss.
The boss battle is pretty cool, and I enjoyed it.
This game still has potential for future updates and content additions. Looking forward to seeing those updates in future.

Great game overall for the price. Great to kill time and relax and not get stressed. Love the artwork and the 8-bit theme and animations. Gameplay is fun and the survival aspect is an added bonus.

It's alright.
The controls are definitely janky, but the core gameplay is decent. I don't really care for the default look of the character sprite, but you can change it (to a limited but okay selection of others), and that's just personal taste anyway.