I agree with other reviewers that at the current state it's pretty basic and definitely has potential. 

Here are my 2 power crystals:
- UI for choosing element upgrades is confusing.  I think, it would be better to either list all available combinations (taking available materials) or something like "click first element -> click second element -> confirm/abort" 
- Music - I like the current choice, but would love to see few less intense tracks to be dropped in for variety. 

Great concept, with the open aspect of setting up the towers, we can create choke points very early. by wave 10 they were getting spawn killed before the get around the first bend. Limiting tower points will assist.

Honestly it's pretty barebones right now. It doesn't feel bad or anything, but it needs more stages, enemies and tower types in order to truly be interesting. You could consider also limiting the tower placement options(have some mountains or something where you can't put towers) or make then more expensive, because you can basically put hundreds of towers in the map currently. Good luck!

Really cool level and game concept. I like this games where you have several waves of enemies and you have to defend. As of the game itself it works fine, the music is pretty good, I liked the possibility to upgrade towers, link an element to it and even combine elements. 

At this state, I think you need either add more different levels, or increase the game difficulty with each wave. The game itself is nice and beatiful, but it's boring because there is no challenge. Once you position the towers, that's it you've won the game basically.

Keep it up because the game concept itself is good, and the game works. Now maybe just strive towards making the gameplay more fun by means of being a bit more challenging.

I enjoyed playing this.

Here is my setup though:

I hope you take this the right way as I think this is a cool concept! It's just I didn't really feel threatened as I was playing. None of the monsters made it past the first 2 or 3 towers so I think it could have been more difficult.

I can think of a few things that would help:

• Elements might have effects, e.g. water slows, fire makes them move faster but does damage over time once they're on fire, etc.
• Some enemies might be immune to some things - I didn't feel there was any strategy to which gems I used or where I placed my towers. Maybe some synergy with which types of towers are near each other.
• Maybe something visual to show what I was protecting? A castle or a tower or something rather than just "HP Left 25"

Overall I think this is a really cool concept. I think there is a lot of potential here I'd be happy to play again in future if you continue to make updates :)

Good luck <3

Aegis 🛡

I think you game works just fine, and what else would you want from a tower defense :D Good entry!

A couple of things I would like to comment on:

• I really liked the description, it inspired me to try my best while playing. But I am not sure that you can get that kind of impression from the gameplay itself! I would love to harness the power of fire and air, collect mystical shards and enhance my alchemical prowess. But right now I rather click here and there rather than I am a powerful alchemist :)
• It is not very clear, what some elements actually do and why they are important. For wxample, crystals: why I should use different types of them or how the different spells differ. I can see there are different effects after you combined two effects, but I can't fully comprehend it and notice the difference in the attacks. They all just seem to damage, and I would like to see maybe different damage types more clearly (a frozen enemy, or an enemy on fire maybe). To have more feedback from the game itself would make me feel like my impact is actually meaningful :)
• I think that the difficulty level is pretty low at the moment, the resources are too easy to achieve. And I didn't need any kind of strategy to beat my enemies, so that feels like I just can place towers as randomly as possible :) It would be better to have more heated battles after 10 minutes of gameplay at most, imo.
• After I have built enough towers, I could just watch how the game plays itself for 10 waves now (it is still playing, and I am watching :D ). A quicker pace in difficulty changing would be also nice!
• Something that caught my attention from the beginning — it seems a bit illogical how the enemies go around that small island before attacking me. Why are they actually going that way, only to get more damage? :D I didn't need that section as right now the enemies can't reach this point, but it got me thinking a bit at first.
• It was a bit tricky to click on the right tower when there are many of them. As far as I understood, it is because you should click on its base but not on the tower itself.

Wish you luck!

I’m personally not really big on tower defense. I think your game was enjoyable. You seem to be at the start of nice.

I liked the hexagonal grid. The placement of towers was clear and the radial display of their threat zone made it very easy to decide what to do.

The UI around upgrading towers could use some improvement. There’s no real hint that upgrading towers is how you use the crystals. Instead of having a popup that gets bigger to expand as you level up, I think it would be better if your upgrade UI showed what was possible at various levels. That way the player can think about their investments and decide if they want to really upgrade a tower or place more of them.

The waves of enemies weren’t really challenging for a long time. They started ramping up in difficulty right around when I lost interest in playing further. You might want to consider adding an earlier ramp to the difficulty.

I found that the soundtrack got tiresome after a while. It would be nice to have a way to turn that off, or if it could have more variety.

Cool! I don't see that many tower defense jam submissions. This take feels nice to play and I liked how you could move the towers after you'd bought them. The hexagonal grid was cute. Would be nice if the towers changed appearance when you upgraded them levels. The UI for adding elements to towers I didn't think was that intuitive, took me a minute to work out how to equip them. Some more variety of enemies that synergise with the elemental effects would be great. I felt you acquire crystals too fast/easily for it to be very challenging, but can't expect a jam submission to be really fine tuned difficulty wise. Nice job   

Hey!!   Kudos on getting this complex game up and running!  I did 24 waves, so there is something grabby about your game for sure.  I really like the idea of the elemental currencies and combining them in different ways.  That's a cool unique idea! 

Tower defense games really depend on balancing and design.  BALANCE: Here the balance is a little too easy, so I don't really have to think about what I'm doing.  I just put towers down and upgrade them a lot, and I can play for a long long time without ever losing any life.  In a good tower defense game you should worry about dying in the first 5-10 waves.  You should be forced to make a specific plan to deal with specific enemy type.  Often there are suddenly a bunch of fast enemies that force you to slow them down.  Something like that.  DESIGN: There are a lot of things the player needs to understand in a tower defense game.  What do all the towers and enemies do?  What would strategic and non-strategic decisions look like?  Currently I can't really tell in this game.  I can't really tell what the different towers do, if they have different ranges, different effects, so I don't know why one would be better in one place or another.  I don't know how the different enemies are strong or weak.  In a game like this I need all that info so I can make a plan.   Currently the clearest tower is the magma tower, because I can see exactly which tiles it affects and when.  Its range and attack frequency are very clear, though I'm not exactly sure about its effect. Damage + Slow??

Another important issue here is that upgrading currently feels totally unrewarding.  Mostly I don't see anything different and I can't even see damage numbers go up.  I want to see those towers get bigger and badder!  Instead of having lots of cheap upgrade levels, you should consider having just a  few (3-10) , but upgrades that cost a lot more, so when I make an upgrade it feels big and meaningful.   I should be saving up, and hoping to upgrade a tower just in time to save the day. 

Have you played the Kingdom Rush tower defense games?  I think those are some of the best ever made and worth checking out. 

Nice work on this!  I hope you keep working on it! 

There were a couple areas where I felt the game could have been better. For example, the UI at the right side of the screen was confusing - I couldn't tell which was my currency at the start, because they're all just lines of white text. Later, I started collecting power crystals, but I didn't see any purpose for them. Maybe I needed to upgrade the towers more? 

The enemies never posed a threat. I stopped adding more towers after round 3 and still made it to round 9, where the enemies just started circling the island on the right until my towers eventually picked them off. 

There's also no feedback on the enemies. They don't make any sounds or react to being hit or killed. I think that's a huge area that can be improved, since the majority of gameplay is watching the towers shoot the enemies.

Overall, I think this is a solid representative of a TD game, but I can definitely see a few things you can do to make the game better!

The game is really fun. I think later in the playthrough it becomes even better, the start is a bit easy, overall a good game!

I really enjoyed your game! The idea of using randomly-dropped crystals to improve towers is cool, and I loved that you can move the towers around—it adds a fun strategic layer to the gameplay. The first few waves had a bit of a challenge, but after that, it became too easy since I had an excess of resources.

One thing that could improve the experience is better readability of the game state. UX features like showing tower levels, how much damage each tower is dealing, and the exact effects of the assigned crystals would be great additions.

I also noticed a small bug—when I clicked "Buy tower" and then right-clicked to cancel, I still lost some resources. Overall, though, I had fun, and I’m excited to see how the game evolves, in case you plan to continue development! :)

I enjoyed playing the early stage of this game but I quickly gained so many resources that there was never any challenge. Finding the right balance is difficult but very important for a tower defense game and right now I feel this is far too easy. To me, it felt interesting to place the first few towers strategically but then I realized I could just spam them without thinking. It also never felt like an interesting choice of which tower I should be upgrading and I never understood what their benefits were when incrementally upgrading so it didn't feel as impactful as I'd like.

The combining elements mechanic seems interesting but again I had no idea what the elements do or even how much better those towers are compared to one another. I'd love to see some stats and maybe damage numbers so I can feel the impact of my decisions more.

Overall it works as a tower defense game, but it left me wondering why I would play this over another tower defense game. The combining elements seems to be the most unique factor but it's unclear to me what the elements do. I'd love to see the choice of which elements to be a big component of the game. Certain enemies could be weak against others (and maybe they already are and it's not displayed clearly), and maybe certain elements have different attack patterns/ranges.

Overall this is a solid jam game. If you plan on continuing development I would definitely recommend figuring out how to lean into what makes this a unique tower defense game, and of course finding a way to balance it so it's not too easy to just spam without thinking strategically