Tempest Tower is unlike most Tower Defense games that I have played. It’s cutesy and has interactions that I feel you do not typically see in the genre. For example, you can jump on top of the enemies, which can help kill them faster and protect your base. In the games I have played, I’ve found that I am more of a bystander, where I take my actions before the waves begin, and don’t actually interact with anything throughout, other than placing units.
I really liked the menu and opening screen of Tempest Tower. The music was quite relaxing, and I thought that the menu would make a cute background.
Although I enjoyed my time with Tempest Tower, I did find it quite difficult to get on with. This is because I am left-handed and cannot play games using WASD. At the time of writing, there was no option to change the keybinds, meaning I had to stumble through the tutorial and the game and hope that I would succeed in battle.
For that reason alone, I struggled to put any significant amount of time into Tempest Tower.
The Left-Handed Struggle
I found that I struggled more than I expected because of the inability to change the keybinds. I found that I was often unable to actually jump on top of the enemies and contribute to the battle, as I found it too difficult to control and jump from platform to platform.
The first time I loaded the game, I stopped halfway through the tutorial, with the belief that it would save my progress. However, when I opened it back up to continue, I found that none of my progress had been saved, and I was forced to complete the entire tutorial again.
This was a bit confusing to me, especially as some of the tutorial felt like it was bordering normal levels of gameplay, and felt more like just giving tips along the way rather than a full-blown tutorial by the ‘third’ level.
Retro Aliens
In some ways, it had a bit of a retro feel to it. When you complete a level, you will be able to click on three floppy disks, all of which offer you a different item that you can build to help protect the central tower. The sound also has a retro feel to it, as it sounds like that of a VHS tape. It felt nostalgic to me, and I really enjoyed the audio and visual directions that the developers went for in Tempest Tower.
The Creepers were a little bit gross to me. Although they are very cartoony, they still had a very real bug feel to them, which made me uncomfortable. The way their abdomens had been colored felt like they were about to burst at the seams, which was a horrifying thought to have in a game like this.
Swept Away
I really enjoyed the Gust mechanic in the game, as it felt like I was just sweeping away enemies with a little broom. It is a cute idea, and added an extra level of interaction that I feel a lot of Tower Defense games lack at times.
Combining that with the ability to jump on enemies to kill them faster, it feels a lot more involved than most Tower Defense games. Depending on what buildings you unlock and take with you, there is even the option to use jump pads to gain more height with your jumps, or special mines that require precise jumps in order to activate them.
Overall, I can tell that a lot of love went into creating Tempest Tower, and from what I have played of it, I really did enjoy it. It can get difficult quite quickly, but I also believe that not being able to amend the keybinds contributed to that, based on my personal experience.
