Tower Dominion Review
Tower Dominion checks all the necessary tower defence boxes: it’s simple to understand, offers plenty of strategy, it’s fun, re-playable, and addictive. It might not be a genre revolution, but Tower Dominion has some unique ideas that that add depth to the gameplay and move the genre forward as it blends traditional elements with rogue-lite and RTS mechanics
WHAT IS TOWER DOMINION and why is it good?
Tower Dominion is a tower defence game, but it also mixes in rogue-like elements with a plethora of unlocks and RTS as you need to make micro and macro adjustments on the fly between waves. One of the most unique features about Tower Dominion is that you build and control that path that the enemies must take, known as the expansion phase. Other titles have done this before, but during the expansion phase, not only do you manage the direction of the tiles, which is especially important for flying units, but you also manage the elevation changes. Elevation affects the strength and efficacy of your structures and when you combine elevation with direction and structure upgrades, this provides a high level of strategy with each decision possibly being the difference between victory and defeat.
Tower Dominion features three distinct classes that constantly reminded me of StarCraft. The Iron Dragons are your most traditional military focusing on raw firepower, which align with the Terran. The Pargan Assault Group or PAG embrace advanced technology and a more tactical approach, which feel like a close parallel to the Protoss. The missing link is the Lions of Ravelsky, a class that didn’t feel akin to the Zerg no matter how much I would have wanted them to be. However, they do feature genetically modified super soldiers, which is a pretty good alternative and as close as I could get.
Each faction has a variety of leaders, ten to be exact, that have very different abilities. This alone has the ability to make each run feel unqiue, but it also means that you should easily be able to find a leader with traits that align with your play-style. Each Faction also has a different biome that they fight in including a frozen tundra, desert and woodlands and while it doesn’t affect gameplay, it does offer a nice visual change.
As for the gameplay itself, there are five difficulty levels and on the base level, there are 25 enemy waves. You begin with a base, and a little bit of resources for spending to get yourself started. From here on out, you will receive resources for killing enemies and at the end of each wave you will be offered one of three upgrade packages to choose from. There are three possible items to find: resources, blueprints, which will allow you to build that structure provided you have enough resources to afford it and doctrines, which are upgrades to existing equipment. Each package will contain two items, which could be any combination of those items. It could be two blueprints or one blueprint and some resources etc.
After each run, successful or not, you will more than likely unlock a handful of items with a Pavlovian style bell and with the rogue-like gameplay, you will also unlock permanent commanders to use or unlock new upgrade tiers on equipment from using it.
Tower Dominion is a very addictive game with a lot of strategic depth. In addition to the variety provided from the three different classes, thirty leaders, and end of wave offers, there is also a staggering amount of depth within each unit placed on the battlefield. Each unit or structure has three different levels of upgrades within that can drastically change how that unit or structure operates. Then there are the elevation levels that play an integral role in battle. The higher up a structure is the more effective it is and there are items that can raise the building height as well. There is also the ability to sell each unit and adjust your strategy on the fly if things aren’t going to plan.
WHATS NOT GOOD ABOUT TOWER DOMINION?
The story in Tower Dominion is paper thin, as you are defending the world from invading aliens and having a little more incentive to push on would have been great.. The visuals are very simplistic, which is standard for the genre, however they have a certain charm and feature small attention to detail during upgrade phases. Tower Dominion is Steam Deck verified, but the controls doesn’t feel natural or intuitive in handheld.
There are a also few gameplay choices I wish were different. The first one is that when you have a lot of blueprints, they can become distracting at the bottom of the screen. I wish that they would all collapse into one folder titled blueprints, which could be opened at the clock of a button. It would make the visuals much less cluttered by the end of a busy round.
The other gameplay choice is that during the expansion phase, you have the ability to re-roll land tiles for a cost, but during the reward phase at the end of each wave, you can’t re-roll rewards. Occasionally, the three choices didn’t have enough incentive and it would have been nice to either be able to re-roll those rewards or just get a lump sum of resources for them instead.
VERDICT
Tower Dominion isn’t the kind of game that you want to smash through to see the credits or find out what the story is, which is good, because it doesn’t really have one outside of defending the world from alien creatures. It’s the kind of game that you want to play to wind down after a long day as it somehow uses all of your brain, but doesn’t require deep thinking. Each run can average about 20-30 minutes, but the time melts away.
Tower Dominion might lack in certain areas, but it executes where it needs to flawlessly with an engaging gameplay loop that always begs for one more run with a surprising amount of strategy to expand upon the traditional genre experience. If you have an addictive personality, stay away from Tower Dominion, but if you are looking for a new Tower Defence fix, Tower Dominion is it.
