OTTTD: Over The Top Tower Defense is a game that does its name justice. Learn more about this very fun action-packed release in our OTTTD: Over The Top Tower Defense review!
In OTTTD: Over The Top Tower Defense, you are on Earth in the year 2317, in a moment in time when peace reigns supreme, putting soldiers at risk since they have nothing to do and no way of earning the income they need to survive. HEROCORP cares about this, as it doesn’t want to lose its spot as the 4th largest private military company in the galaxy. The solution to this particular predicament? HEROCORP sets out to launch a “Preemptive Defense Campaign” against parallel dimensions, in order to defend Earth from a potential attack… that does not exist.
Before you dive into this adventure, you can select between the three available difficulty settings. As stated by the game. Easy is for “When you just want to smell gibs in the morning,” Normal is “All in a day’s work,” and Hardcore is for “Truly HEROCORP’s finest.” This decision will depend on your previous experience with tower defense games, and I do suggest that you don’t dive into Hardcore thinking you can deal with it, as you might end up being surprised at the difficulty curve.
As you start, the game will throw you into the mandatory HEROCORP training session. It is here that you will learn to pan the camera around by moving the on-screen cursor with the left analog stick. If you need to zoom into the action, you can do so with the right analog stick. You’ll be given your first hero, an Engineer, to control around the playing area. Select it with the cursor by pressing the A button, and then move the cursor to the location you want the unit to move to.
Your first tower will be the Gatling Tower, a fast targeting building with a high rate of fire, and you will get a couple of them during the tutorial mission to get you going. You can move your Engineer closer to a tower, and it will repair that tower when it’s not attacking enemies. You can cycle between the deployed towers with the ZL and ZR buttons, and you can use the Engineer hero’s ability to boost a tower’s damage. Powering up a tower can make a huge difference in battle, especially when there are some small but deadly enemies mixed in with the larger, more powerful, but slower types. You start with just the one hero but will unlock more as you go – up to a total of seven -, and you’ll end up with a nice party of three heroes to boost your odds of survival.
Completing the first tutorial mission will award your Engineer hero with enough experience points for him to level up. By doing this, you will gain skill points which you can allocate to his power-ups or abilities. For example, the Engineer has a passive skill called endurance that boosts his overall health. There’s also remote repair, which grants you the opportunity to repair a tower from a distance – since this is a powerful skill, it will have a considerable cooldown period before you can use it again. Ultratower is the attack boost ability I mentioned before, and you can upgrade it to increase the percentage boost as well as the duration of the ability. If you use skill points to unlock new skills, you will open up even more new skills to maximize your hero’s potential.
There are different types of enemies to face, and that means you’ll need to use different types of towers to counter them. While the regular Gatling Tower is good for most units, there are some armored units out there that will need to be taken care of with the might of the Pulse Cannon. You also need to make good use of the money that you get from the enemies you defeat, as this can be used to build new towers as well as to upgrade the towers you have deployed, thus boosting their attack and range.
As you advance in the game, each tower you’ve unlocked will start to receive additional conversion modules that allow you to turn a regular tower of said type into a more advanced tower that will be more powerful, deadly, and useful… at a price. The regular Gatling Tower can be turned into a tower that deals more damage and has a bigger range, which is great since then you’ll be able to target enemies from far away before they even get close to the tower to deal some damage to it. This way you can keep your Engineer busy repairing other towers that might have been overrun by enemies. Speaking of this, the good news is that unlike other tower defense games you might have played, towers that run out of health are not destroyed. Instead, they’re only incapacitated, so your Engineer can repair them in a few seconds.
The money you collect, as well as the red gems you obtain, can be used to purchase better weapons and armor for your heroes. This is a must if you want to succeed in battle as new weapons will boost your hero’s attack power, range, and critical hit percentage, and some weapons might also deal some splash damage once they connect with an enemy! Armor will boost your hero’s overall health, and the more expensive armor will also boost the hero’s attack range, movement speed, and damage, while also giving you an extra bonus on the side. There is, for example, a rather expensive piece of armor that, for some reason, looks like a piece of cheese. Sure, it’s certainly weird, but you’ll probably forget about that when you realize it will boost the experience points and coins you collect.
OTTTD: Over The Top Tower Defense is an easy game to recommend both to those new to the genre as well as to those that, like me, have loved this particular genre for many years now. The seven different heroes offer a nice range of different unit types and a good variety of skills to mix and match, and there are many weapons and armor options as well to make the most of the coin you collect and the red gems you obtain. There’s a ton of content to enjoy for this one, and it’s available at a very low $7.99, making it a must-have for Nintendo Switch owners.
Disclaimer
This OTTTD: Over The Top Tower Defense review is based on a Nintendo Switch copy provided by SMG Studio.
