Fort Defense

If you are looking for a classic Tower Defense experience you've come to the right place. There's nothing fancy about this title but that's its strength. The graphics are simple but nice, the gameplay is exactly what you want from a TD title, building and upgrading towrs while fending off waves of varied enemies.

My rating on an A-F scale for "Fort Defense": B-
More Details on Joint Review:
It is worth looking at FOUR of 8th-Floor's tower defense games in the same review, because they are all the same game. These are: Royal Defense (2014), Fort Defense (2015), Iron Sea Defenders (2016) and Medieval Defenders (2016). All these games belong to a sub-genre of tower defense games characterized by the popular Kingdom Rush series. There are turrets you can build at fixed locations along a road. The road has one or more starting points and one or more end points. Enemies traverse the road from start to end. Your job is to prevent them from making it to the end, which is the tower to defend. The enemies have varying strengths, including fliers, that are susceptible to specific towers. During the course of the game you can strengthen your turrets and defenses by earning some form of currency. There are various difficulties you can choose from, such as "easy", "normal" or "hard". For the better games in this genre, a considerable amount of trial-and-error is needed, and cunning strategies, that combine the strengths of the turrets, are required to win. That is essentially the game plan in a nutshell. The above mentioned 8-th floor games all follow this plan. But the "sameness" is more than that. All the games have the exact same enemy types and the same four basic towers that upgrade in exactly the same way. The sound effects are all the same. There is no real difference between these four games except the settings. In Fort and Iron Sea Defenses, for example, the animal enemies of Royal Defense are replaced by ships. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the types of enemies that are ships in the Fort and Iron Sea versus "people or beasts" in Royal. For instance, a ship with a green cross heals nearby frigates from damage you cause, while a healer with a staff does the same in Royal Defense. Essentially 8th-Floor is marketing the same game three times under different disguises. So, with that background, here is my experience and recommendations. I found the best and most engaging game to be the first one - Royal Defense. I liked it and played it to win all levels with three stars. After that, Fort Defense and Iron Sea Defense are okay, but not as entertaining because the novelty has worn off. Also, they do not allow you to re-organize your defensive upgrades to better suit later levels. This is a step backwards in sophistication. A further point to be aware of is that these games have "Downloadable Content" (DLC). Steam offers packages that include it. It is a must to have, in order to get the full benefit of the game because it contains perhaps two-thirds of the actual full game. I am not a proponent of this style of doing business - it is a kind of flim-flam in which you are lured in with a small amount of money, to spend more and more. If I were to grade these games A-F, with the Kingdom Rush Series in the A category, the three main games would be "B+" for Royal, "B-" for Fort and "C" for Iron Sea. I recommend these three games, especially "Royal". If you like it, you may also enjoy the other two. Finally, "Medieval Defenders" is in my junk pile - a "fail". It is truly worthless with so many flaws that it is not worth talking about. It surprises me that a good game company, such as 8-th Floor, would tarnish its reputation by selling such an ill conceived and poorly made game. It is not recommended at any price.

A pretty good old-fashioned tower defense game. Not revolutionary, quite a few negative points, but you can have fun and pass the time with this not too expensive game.

Average.