The concept of tower defense games was born in the homemade map boom represented by Starcraft and Warcraft at the beginning of the century, and basically laid down many important elements as the foundation of tower defense games. In just 20 years of development, tower defense games have given birth to many distinctive branches.
(War3 can’t lose tower defense, just like the West can’t lose Jerusalem)
In 2021, a tower defense game came out on top of the Indieplay China competition and took first place as the best student entry.
The core gameplay is to use the randomly refreshed defense towers in the store to lay freely on the large map, and to design the enemy’s route with a high degree of freedom by constructing the defense units in a reasonable way. The number and position of towers can be adjusted at any time by synthesizing and upgrading between towers of the same type.
A new and creative attempt
Returning to Reframing, the game fully inherits the main gameplay of this variant, but also cleverly integrates Rougelike elements into the game mechanics: not only are the purchasable defense towers randomly refreshed, but the advanced defense towers available for its synthesis mechanism, the Reframing system, are also constantly refreshed randomly as the number of turns accumulates.
If it were just a simple random refresh of defense towers, the number of combinations would not be huge; but the game mechanics that make Reforged more hardcore while interesting are its two main mechanisms of map building and attribute matching.
Each defense tower you buy will be randomly matched with a graphic base, and the enemies can only move in the grid with the base, so all the player needs to do is to use the base to put together the opening 3×3 size What players need to do is to use the base of the patchwork, the opening 3×3 size of the “H” version of the map to expand, to extend the route of the enemy’s march.
The same map will also be randomly generated on the effect of different trap grid, traps greatly improve the difficulty of planning, but also let the tower defense this play burst into a new fire.
On one side to design the enemy’s route of travel, the other side must also take into account the route can cover most of the traps, and the control ability of the stronger traps can also be properly concentrated firepower. If unreasonable planning, the defense will be very difficult, and in turn, if you use a long-term vision to layout in advance, it will be easy to navigate.
The gradual development from a 3×3 map to a complete large map is also one of the biggest cool points of this game.
Plate planning, route planning and fire planning, these three elements constitute the core gameplay of this game “Reconstruction”, and it is hard to go far if you only take care of one of them. If you want to pursue higher scores, you may even need to bring your own grid book or Excel sheet to design a route plan in advance.
However, these three plans do not exist in isolation. Before planning your route, you first need to fill the plat; and before planning your fire deployment, you need to plan your route based on random terrain and traps. These three aspects of planning and design are complementary and require constant play and trial and error in order to achieve three calculations in one step.
Versatile gameplay
The most noteworthy element and skill mechanics of “Reframing” are the five elements of gold, wood, water, fire and earth, which are available for purchase. After using the “Reconstruct” system to synthesize three basic towers into a more advanced “Reconstruct Tower”, the original basic tower will be transformed into the corresponding elemental beads, providing attribute bonuses for the “Reconstruct Tower”. The reconstructed towers will be transformed into more powerful turrets with different elemental properties and passive effects, such as “Cannon”, “Scattershot”, “Blaster”, “Rotor”, etc. “Rotor Cannon” and so on.
And whether you draw the basic elemental tower, or left synthetic reconstructed defense tower recipe, these will all be randomized each time you open the level. Isn’t it a kind of self-traveling chess, you can choose to upgrade the system to improve the probability of drawing a high level elemental tower, or you can use it to re-follow the elemental tower to see if you can brush the one you want to use to reconstruct.
The stacking mechanism between “reconstructed towers” enhances the playability of this elemental system: up to three reconstructed towers can be placed on top of each other, and their elemental beads and passive skills will be stacked on top of the original “reconstructed tower”.
The different elements also provide five different bonuses: Gold provides 20% base attack, Wood provides %15% base fire rate, Water provides 20% freeze, Fire provides 5% blast, and Earth provides 15% splash. This means that different types of turrets need to be paired with different skills and focus on a certain two elemental specializations to achieve the highest yield.
The ability to put together an orderly mix of interesting ideas and make a series of not-so-complex mechanics blend with what could be considered hardcore exploitable space is one of the extremely good aspects of Reforged as a tower defense game. Let tower defense this kind of strategy backboard and then follow the steps can pass the game, to a certain extent, a new opportunity to give tower defense enthusiasts a higher operating ceiling and thinking space.
Reconstructed” is both fun and hardcore, and even meets the needs of different levels of players, whether it is light players who like to experience new ways of playing, or hardcore players who will explore the game mechanics, and even go to constantly refresh their achievements, they can find the fun of the game.
Perhaps, this is what a tower defense game should do, to create unlimited possibilities with limited defense units. Reconstruction” even incorporates Rougelike gameplay to create a more complex and large combination of defense units. Although as an independent game, design oversights are inevitable, but the studio at this stage has always maintained a few days to update the speed of optimization, is very encouraging.
The shortcomings of the game
Finally, let’s look at the shortcomings of the game, the game level content is still relatively small, only six levels of the standard mode, resulting in the difficulty curve is not smooth. Because the front is a teaching level, the difficulty is not high, while the focus on the hardcore to the endless mode, the player needs to pay more time to learn and trial and error, more suitable for hardcore players.
A part of the skill design also dragged the leg, in the framework of Rougelike, any design should serve the diversity of choice, according to this theory, the pursuit of DPS (damage per second) priority tower defense game, and should not appear such as gold elements (increase attack power) and wood elements (increase the speed of fire) the two elements of pure color skills. Because these two skills stacked, it can provide 3 gold 3 wood elemental bonus, and the effect of two skills more horrible, can provide an additional 1 gold 1 wood bonus. These two skills can precisely make up for the shortcomings of the scattering tower shooting speed, easily build an output machine, so that the original versatile set, into a single target pursuit.
Of course, this problem may not be discovered until a long time after the player, itself does not affect the game experience in the first and middle of the game.
Cured of years of low blood pressure, the right elemental tower point will be deducted and can not be canceled, you do not know what elemental tower will appear completely face, in addition to the inability to recover resources is also a problem, once the lack of resources into the deadlock, then the best way I’m afraid is to reopen.
Conclusion
The short history of tower defense games for more than 20 years is in fact the process of introducing new concepts to enrich the game content with the most original tower defense concept as the core. Just like what “Reconstruction” has done, it extracts the most essential elements of resource operation and defense planning as traditional tower defense games, and delivers the fun of tower defense to players practically. It is believed that in the near future, “Reframing” will also bring players a better gaming experience as it constantly updates and improves the game content, or opens up creative workshops.
This is a very creative and groundbreaking tower defense game, very worthy of tower defense fans to try.
