Video Game / The Tower - Idle Tower Defense

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The Tower - Idle Tower Defense (or alternatively shortened as The Tower) is an Idle Game released in 2021 for Android and iOS devices, developed and published by Tech Tree Games.

At its core, The Tower is a mashup of the idle "incremental" game and Tower Defense genres; the player needs to defend one tower in the center of the screen from waves of approaching enemies, while gradually accumulating various currencies and resources for upgrades that may help them reach higher waves or tiers.

Apart from the usual Macrogame mechanics, the game's other notable features include themes or cosmetics, limited-time Events, and a Tournament game mode where players compete in a leaderboard within a given amount of time.

This game contains examples of:

• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Most unlockables and stat upgrades gradually become more expensive the higher you level them up or the more you keep on purchasing. It essentially means your progression can be determined by your tower's overall effectiveness through spent resources. There is a Lab Rrsearch that let you refund all Coins spent on Workshop and Module upgrades should you ever wish to reset your progress in these specific aspects, but using this feature costs a considerable amount of Gems.
• Ad Reward: You can receive bonuses or rewards by watching short ads.
  • As a feature called "Ad Gems", a button on the lower left periodically appears during a round; tapping it and letting the ad play for a given time rewards you 5 Gems.
  • The Store menu offers a daily 15 "Free Gem Reward" for letting an ad play within a given time.
  • The 1.5 Coins Multiplier can be activated in an ongoing round by watching an ad. It's also accumulative, such that tapping its button to watch more ads extends its timer.
  • However, there are microtransactions that let you disable ads from appearing in-game but still receive their bonuses.
• After Boss Recovery: The "Package After Boss" Lab upgrade ensures a recovery package will always spawn to heal your tower after fighting a boss.
• Aliens Steal Cattle: There's an Event Theme featuring an alien invasion wherein your tower, represented by an "Unlucky Cow", gets caught by a UFO's Tractor Beam.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Lab upgrades are essentially permanent, but some of them provide sliders that let you adjust specific multipliers to your liking. This is especially helpful for situational Daily and Event missions. For example, there are times when you want to shorten your tower's range so that enemies are more likely to be hit by your Inner Land Minds and Orbs.
  • If you haven't completed a Daily Mission yet, its progress would still be remembered and persistently kept even beyond daily and weekly resets until you manage to complete it. This is especially helpful for specific Daily Missions such as "Kill enemies with Inner Land Mines" that may require a lot of time (which can even take several days), effort, or luck to complete.
  • The game ensures the Daily Missions handed out are "doable" within your current capacitiy by taking into account the features, cards, and upgrades that you already have. This prevents Daily Missions from becoming Unwinnable by Design.
  • Modules tend to be replaceable at the player's discretion, but the game has several layers of features that help you manage your favorite copies:
    • You can lock the Modules you want to keep so as to avoid accidentally shattering them or merging them with other Modules.
    • The Effect substat list of Modules also has a lock feature which lets you keep any desired substat while rerolling.
    • You can "reset" a Module to refund all the Coins spent in upgrading it (which is extremely helpful if you want to replace a Module with another one without having to re-farm the Coins needed for upgrading the latter). And even if the Module will have its level reverted to 1, its substats will still be kept (which is useful if you don't want to lose any high-rarity substats in case you change your mind and re-upgrade that Module). The only downside to resetting Modules is that any Reroll Shards spent can't be recovered, which the game also pre-emptively warns you about.
  • Several unlockable upgrades from the Lab are essentially quality-of-life features that make the overall gameplay experience easier. For example, Target Priority lets you decide which enemy should your tower focus on first (such as the dreaded Vampires), while Reroll Daily Mission lets you get rid of difficult and time-consuming daily missions.
• Arbitrary Augmentation Limit: Your tower can be enhanced by equippable Cards and Modules, though there are limits on how many can you bring at once in a round:
  • The amount of Cards you can equip depends on how many Card Slots are available, though more slots can be purchased with Gems.
  • You can only equip one of each Module type (Cannon, Armor, Generator, Core).
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: The game has a variant when it comes to limiting projectile range; the Range stat determines how far should an enemy approach before your tower starts firing projectiles at it.
• Arrange Mode: "Heat" mechanics are automatic gameplay modifiers that make each Tournament feel unique or varied, most of which crank up the difficulty by providing buffs to the enemies. The effects of Heat mechanics also gradually increase as you reach higher waves in a Tournament.
• Attack Speed Buff:
  • There's a basic Attack Speed stat that determines the speed at which projectiles are fired from your tower. Apart from the usual Workshop and Battle upgrades, it can also be enhanced further by the Attack Speed card.
  • "Rapid Fire" is a luck-based state where your tower fires 4 times faster than usual. There are two stats which determine its duration and the chance of it occuring.
  • Some Tournaments may apply an "Enemy Attack Speed" Heat buff that, as its name implies, increases the attack speed of enemies.
• Auto-Save: If you have an account bound for the online cloud saving feature, the game automatically forces a cloud sync in the background to save your progress whenever you trigger an Ad Reward.
• Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic: There's a safety net when buying Modules with Gems; you are guaranteed to obtain an Epic rarity Module within 150 purchases if you had an unlucky streak.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Damage and Health are always some of the few relatively cheapest Workshop Upgrades available (alongside Health Regen and Defense Absolute) and their high upgrade caps mean you'll be constantly upgrading them. However, there are other upgrades that are also directly affected by these two stats (such as Land Mine Damage and Wall Health), making them essentially equate to hitting two birds with one stone.
  • The "Free Attack/Defense/Utility Upgrades" upgrades, and the "Free Upgrades" card provide you chances of earning free upgrades when a wave is cleared. There are no flashy visual effects involved, only the Random Number God, but consistently receiving automatic free upgrades benefits you a lot in the long run and lets you spread out and spend your accumulated Cash on other upgrades of your choice or those that are not yet maxed out.
  • The white Standard perks may not be as specialized as the green Ultimate Weapon perks or the purple Trade-off perks, but every duplicate copy you choose makes their effects stack. Some basic tower stats like "Defense %" can be easily min-maxed thanks to perks, and one particular Standard perk can reduce the "Perk Wave Requirement" which retroactively allows you to choose more perks if you've already gotten far in a round.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: There are microtransactions and bonuses purchasable with real money that give the player some advantage over those who are strictly free-to-play. For example, the 1.5 Coins Multiplier Ad Reward is only effective for a given duration (and likewise requires the player to keep watching short ads to extend it). The shop lets you buy a time-saving feature that disables ads from appearing but also makes the 1.5 Coins Multiplier permanently active.
• Cap Raiser: Though the game's progression heavily relies on raising stats and caps of many sorts, the "Max Interest" Lab Upgrade is one of the most straightforward examples of cap raisers. Initially, it's very easy to reach the Interest cap per wave, so this upgrade raises the cap to make the Interest feature more effective in the long run.
• Cat Stereotype: The tower and background skins from the "Meowy Night" event evoke the mysterious, creepy, or "evil" stereotype of black cats, with the background featuring numerous black cats staring at you.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Battle upgrades and Workshop upgrades typically have a blue background color, but will turn gold if they're already maxed out.
  • Perks are color-coded to denote their type; Standard perks are white, Ultimate Weapon perks are green, and Trade-off perks are purple.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: The rarity of Modules and their substat Effects are color-coded, from White (Common), Cyan (Rare), Pink (Epic), Yellow (Legendary), Orange (Mythic), and Light Green (Ancestral).
• Contractual Boss Immunity:
  • Death Ray instantly kills most enemies it touches, but is completely ineffective against bosses.
  • Initially, bosses don't take damage from your Orbs, but the "Orb Boss Hit" Lab Upgrade zig-zags this after being unlocked. With it, your Orbs will damage bosses, albeit by chipping away a percentage of the boss' health.
• Cooldown Manipulation: Numerous stats, features and mechanics (notably the Bots obtainable from Events, and several Ultimate Weapons) rely on cooldowns before they can be activated again, but they also come with purchasable upgrades that let you reduce their cooldowns and make them usable more often.
• Critical Hit: The Critical Chance stat determines the rate of your tower's attacks landing a critical hit, and the Critical Factor stat determines the damage boost multiplier of your critical attacks. Later on, you can also unlock Super Crit stats which give your critical hits a chance of dealing way more damage.
• Damage Reduction: There are two stats that calculate or determine how much damage is reduced when your tower is hit by an enemy; "Defense %" reduces an enemy's attack by a given percentage and it's applied first, followed by "Defense Absolute" which further reduces the enemy's damage by a given numerical value.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Version 26 repositioned the Account Linking feature to the upper-left of the Settings menu, which could throw off the muscle memory of a player who got used to tapping its previous location from the older versions.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Upon being defeated, your tower and enemies alike blow up into vibrant-colored neon particles.
• Deliberate Injury Gambit: The Thorn mechanic deals damage to the enemy in retaliation as it hits your tower. There's also a specific "Wall Thorns" upgrade that applies this mechanic to your wall.
• Disc-One Nuke: Due to how Damage Reduction works, Defense Absolute is extremely useful in Tier 1 as it's easy for the stat to exceed the enemies' damage. This means your tower becomes impervious for hundreds of waves if you just keep upgrading it. Unfortunately, it falls off in the next Tiers where it becomes a Dump Stat.
• Double Unlock:
  • You need to unlock the appropriate Ultimate Weapon first before you can actually research and unlock its Lab Upgrades. But even then, said Lab Upgrades are only "revealed" after you reach specific waves in higher tiers. These requirements are already complex on their own, but just like all other Lab Upgrades. you also need enough Coins to start researching Ultimate Weapon upgrades.
  • Although you can reveal both of these upgrades after reaching a specific wave in a higher tier, the "Auto Pick Ranking" Lab Upgrade requires you to have already finished researching the "Auto Pick Perks" Lab Upgrade first.
  • New Cards are added to the card pool after reaching specific Milestones in the higher Tiers, but just like any other card, you need to spend Gems for the chance of getting them.
• Dump Stat: Because it reduces damage by a "flat" numerical value, the Defense Absolute stat falls off post-Tier 1 where the enemies' damage stat increases exponentially faster than what Defense Absolute can negate, unlike the Defense % stat which always scales its Damage Reduction benefit with the enemy's attack value no matter which Tier you're in.
• Energy Weapon: The Death Ray card makes your tower periodically fire off a sweeping laser beam that instantly kills smaller enemies on contact, though it doesn't work against bosses.
• Equipment Upgrade:
  • Duplicates of Cards are automatically consumed to upgrade the main copy of the Card, with each star permanently boosting its effects.
  • Modules have a more complex upgrade system; they require Shards and Coins for each upgrade level, specific level thresholds unlock Effect slots, the Effect substats can be rerolled with Reroll Shards. All of these are directly affected by the Module's rarity, and the latter can be upgraded by constantly "merging" the Module with other pre-requisite Modules.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: The aptly-named "Faster Than Light" event has themed skins that make your tower and background look like a Starship traveling through Hyper Space.
• Flying Car: The "Cyberpunk" event has a tower skin that turns your tower into a futuristic flying car, best partnered with its companion background skin that depicts a cyberpunk city.
• Gameplay Automation: Provided that there are enough Coins, the Lab queue feature will automatically continue a Lab Upgrade after it finishes the previous upgrade level.
• Genre Mashup: The Tower combines concepts from the "incremental" Idle Game genre where you can accumulate currencies and resources to buy upgrades, and the Tower Defense genre where you literally have to defend one tower in the center of the screen from waves of approaching enemies.
• Heroic Second Wind: As its name suggests, the Second Wind card lets your tower survive from an attack that would've killed it and grants a brief moment of invincibility.
• Highly Specific Counterplay: The "Garlic Thorns" Lab Upgrade is specifically designed to counter and damage Vampires as they try to attack your tower.
• Holiday Mode:
  • Several Events are typically based on real-life seasons, holidays or celebrations, which is why the game has Relics, Tower and Background Themes revolving around Easter, Autumn, Halloween, New Year, and so on.
  • For a few days starting from Christmas Day, the game doubles the amount of daily free Ad Gems that can be obtained from the shop, complete with a different design for the claim button.
  • There are also times when the devs mail in-game items to celebrate a real-life occasion, such as 100 Gems being given to celebrate the New Year on 2025.
• It Only Works Once: Some cards (e.g. Demon Mode, Nuke) can only be used once per round, with their HUD icon or button disappearing after activation.
• Knockback: There's an emphasis on knockback mechanics to the point where your tower can have a Knockback Chance stat that determines the rate at which your projectiles push back enemies, and a Knockback Force stat that determines how far would an enemy be pushed back.
• Life Drain: The Lifesteal mechanic heals your tower based on the damage you deal to enemies.
• Macrogame: Only the accumulated Cash and "battle upgrades" are truly gone when you lose a round. Numerous currencies and upgrades persist, allowing you to have a better tower on your next attempts:
  • Coins are the first persistent currency that you can acquire and they have several purposes; from purchasing permanent Workshop Upgrades and Lab upgrades, to upgrading Modules.
  • Gems are rarer and more valuable than Coins, allowing you to buy more Cards, Card Slots, Modules, and Lab slots. They can also be used to instantly complete Lab upgrades.
  • Stones let you buy and upgrade Ultimate Weapons.
  • There are four Module Shards spent to upgrade modules of their respective types. Reroll Shards are consumed for rerolling the substat Effects of Modules.
  • Medals are spent in Event Shops to buy gameplay-enhancing cosmetics and music, to buy and upgrade Bots, or be exchanged for Gems, Stones or Module Shards.
• Magikarp Power: Health Regen initially looks like a Dump Stat because it is easily overshadowed when you max out your Lifesteal stat (as it can heal your tower faster or near-instantly as you deal damage to enemies) and unlock the Recovery Package upgrades (which let your tower instantly recover lost health and overflow beyond its normal health meter). However, it becomes relevant for investment later when The Wall is unlocked, specifically because the latter's Wall Regen scales with your Health Regen stat and makes the most out of it thanks to further Lab upgrades.
• Money Grinding: The express purpose of the Enemy Balance card is to help you in farming Cash quickly. Aside from increasing the Cash earned per enemy kill, it also increases the number of enemies that spawn per wave.
• Money Multiplier:
  • The Utility upgrades include "Cash Bonus" and "Coins / Kill Bonus" stats that respectively increase the amount of cash and coins you can earn.
  • The Golden Tower ultimate weapon primarily provides a temporary boost to your Cash and Coin earnings from enemy kills.
  • Some Ultimate Weapons have their own "Coin Bonus" Lab Upgrade (i.e. Death Wave Coin Bonus, Black Hole Coin Bonus, Spotlight Coin Bonus) that temporarily increases the amount of Coins earned while the Ultimate Weapon is in effect.
• Multishot: The "Multishot" feature allows your tower to fire at multiple enemies simultaneously instead of firing at just one enemy at a time, though it relies on two stats to determine the chance of it occuring and how many targets can be hit at the same time.
• Neon City: The aptly-named "Cyberpunk" event rewards a background skin that shows futuristic tall buildings having neon lights and holograms.
• Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award:
  • Tower and Background themes also permanently increase your overall Coin Multiplier.
  • Relics provide permanent passive bonuses aside from being items that can be showcased on the player's Profile card.
• Orbiting Particle Shield:
  • Some Upgrades and Cards can spawn orbs that spin around your tower, dealing damage to enemies upon contact. Their rotating speed can also be enhanced.
  • Initially, the Inner Land Mines Ultimate Weapon simply spawns special red land mines near your tower, but a Lab Upgrade allows them to rotate around, dealing damage to enemies upon contact like Orbs do, albeit they explode like typical Land Mines.
• One-Hit Polykill: The "Bounce Shot" feature makes your projectiles bounce to other targets instead of stopping immediately after hitting one enemy, though it relies on three stats; the "Chance" of it occuring, the number of "Targets" a projectile can bounce off from, and the maximum "Range" at which the projectile can bounce in between enemies.
• Pain and Gain: The Berserker card gives you a stacking permanent attack buff whenever you get hit by enemies.
• Percent Damage Attack:
  • Thorns Counter-Attack enemies by damaging them for a percentage of their maximum HP, though it's halved for bosses.
  • The Plasma Cannon card instantly zaps away a specific percentage of a boss enemy's HP.
  • Normally, Orbs don't deal damage to bosses. But after the "Orb Boss Hit" Lab upgrade is unlocked, Orbs will chip away a percentage of a boss's health upon each contact.
• Pictorial Letter Substitution: The stylized title art replaces the letter "o" in "The Tower" with a hexagon.
• Play Every Day:
  • The game has Daily Missions which offer various currencies (Coins, Gems, Shards) for every task completed. 2 missions are given out every 8 hours, for a maximum of 6 missions available at once, and you won't receive additional missions until you can free up some slots. There's also a Weekly Challenge tracker which lets you open crates containing even more currencies (Coins, Gems, Stones, Medals) for every 5 missions completed.
  • The 15 Free Gem Reward in the Store Menu can only be acquired if you tap its button and let an ad play, but the reward is only eligible for a day and another one would be available after the next daily reset.
  • Event Missions always include two tasks that encourage the player to login daily and likewise claim the daily 15 Free Gem Reward in the Store menu.
• Power Equals Rarity: Higher-rarity Cards and Modules offer unique and powerful effects than the lower-rarity ones that simply increase the multipliers of basic stats. However, the lower-rarities drop so often, so each duplicate allows you to enhance them faster or more easily than the rarer ones.
• Power-Up Letdown: Intro Sprint is a Rare card that has benefits coupled with noticeable drawbacks, especially after its October 2024 rework. Basically, it lets you fast-forward or skip tens of waves at once, but as its name implies, it only works at the start of each round and becomes useless past the waves that it could skip. It also needs you to have already progressed enough in a Tier as a pre-requisite and flawlessly survive the bosses that are periodically spawned. Otherwise, taking damage can pre-emptively stop the effects of Intro Skip, thus you can't consistently rely on it to instantly reap the Milestone rewards of a newly-unlocked Tier. Other trade-offs while an Intro Sprint is active include Coins not dropping or specific cards like Demon Mode being disabled. All things considered, it's only good for a short burst of head-start and it can shave off some grinding time if you satisfy its conditions, but it still becomes overshadowed by Wave Skip which can persist throughout the entire round.
• Random Number God:
  • There's a lot of RNG involved in some stats and basic mechanics; from the chance of landing a critical hit, super crits, multishots, rapid fire shots, or bounce shots, the chance of land mines spawning from defeated enemies, the chance of defying death, the chance of receiving automatic free upgrades per wave, the chance of receiving recovery packages, etc. Luck is a major factor that determines how far you can go in a round.
  • You can spend Gems for random Cards and Modules, though the game also has Anti-Frustration Features and Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanics that ensure your currency isn't totally wasted even if you had bad luck.
  • Stones are spent to unlock a random Ultimate Weapon. Specifically, the game lets you choose one among a list of three randomized choices.
  • Although you can receive Perks upon reaching specific waves, your choices of Perks are randomized each time. Among them, there's even a Perk that temporarily unlocks a random Ultimate Weapon that you don't have yet. Furthermore, it is possible to have only purple Power at a Price perks available to pick from.
• Rare Random Drop: Defeated bosses may randomly give you a common or rare Module, with the latter kind being expectedly harder to get.
• Reduced-Downtime Features: When equipping another module, the game offers an option to automatically transfer the level of your previously-equipped module to the new one, streamlining the process of upgrading the latter.
• Reduced Resource Cost:
  • "Labs Coin Discount" reduces the coin cost of all other Lab upgrades.
  • The "Workshop Attack/Defense/Utility Discount" upgrades reduce the coin cost of workshop upgrades within a given type.
• Regenerating Health:
  • The "Health Regen" stat determines how much of your tower's health is restored per second if it's not yet full.
  • The "Wall Regen" Lab Upgrade makes your wall's health slowly regenerate for as long as it's not yet completely destroyed.
• Shout-Out:
  • The "Into the Matrix" event has a Relic named "No Spoon", a clear reference to the "There Is No Spoon" moment from The Matrix.
  • A specific skin from an event makes your tower resemble The Eye of Sauron.
  • The "Retro Arcade" event is themed around video game culture, and one of its skins turns your tower into an alien invader sprite from Space Invaders. A rerun of the event would later on include the "Power Glove" relic which resembles The Infinity Gauntlet of Thanos.
  • There's a "Cthulhu" event themed around the eponymous Eldritch Abomination of the Cthulhu Mythos.
• Simple, yet Awesome:
  • The basic stats (Damage, Health, Critical Chance, Attack Range, and Defense %) can be significantly upgraded by permanent Common-rarity Cards and temporary Perks. You can't go wrong with straightforward upgrades that directly affect your damage output and survivability without relying on gimmicks.
  • Wave Skip is a time-saver at first glance, but it also works well with other cards and mechanics that can be triggered at the end of each wave, such as "Free Attack/Defense/Utility Upgrades".
  • Energy Shield lets your tower completely negate one instance of enemy attack, but because its usage naturally replenishes over time, it's more consistent than the other epic-rarity cards (e.g. Second Wind and Demon Mode) that can only be used once per round.
  • There's a white Standard Perk that increases the maximum game speed of the current round. Given how it's already easy to fully upgrade and reach the max x5 game speed via the Lab, having something that speeds up the game even further lets you save up time and farm more efficiently. And because it's a Standard Perk, the bonus speed multiplier can be improved by a specific Lab research.
• Situational Damage Attack: The "Damage / Meter" stat increases the damage you deal the further the enemy is from your tower.
• Stat Overflow: After unlocking the Recovery Package utility upgrade, completed waves may drop recovery packages that heal your tower for a given amount, or make it "overheal" if it's already at full health. The excess health bar is indicated with an indigo meter overlaying the usual cyan health bar. The "Max Recovery" stat and its upgrades determine the max cap of the excess health bar.
• Status Effects: As its name suggests, the Slow Aura card decreases the speed of enemies within your tower's range.
• Super Mode:
  • The Demon Mode card lets you manually activate a temporary Status Buff that grants your tower invincibility and increased damage. As a trade-off, it can only be used once per round.
  • The Super Tower card temporarily increases your tower's damage for 15 seconds, although it also periodically goes into a 30-second cooldown before re-activating.
• Suspend Save: Especially with online cloud saving enabled, the game automatically saves your current progress in an ongoing round whenever you close the app. You can then have an option to either resume or end the round the next time you open the app.
• Temporary Online Content: Some game contents and rewards are only available for a limited time and thus require online connectivity. Aside from the usual Daily and Weekly Missions, there are:
  • Tournaments where players compete in a leaderboard within a given amount of time.
  • Events, which have their own limited-time Missions, Shop items, Relics, and Themes (Tower and Background).
• Theme Naming: Event-related Relics and Skins are usually named after the specific theme of the event. For example, the "Honey" event gives honeybee-related Relics such as Honey Jar, Heavenly Sweet, Honey Society, and The Queen.
• Vampires Hate Garlic: Vampires are a type of enemies that quickly drain your tower's health. There's an upgrade called "Garlic Thorns" that specifically counters and damages Vampires as they drain your tower's health, and it's a play on how vampires are repelled by garlic.