I’m a little surprised that we haven’t seen more people take Use-Map-Settings games from Starcraft and beyond and making them standalone titles to sell on Steam. These games that are able to be built within the confines of another game’s map editor have so much creativity and draw in such large crowds it seems like gold for the taking. Especially considering how popular games like DOTA 2 and League of Legends have become, it seems like leaving money on the table. I assume that’s what Element Studios was thinking when they took the Element TD custom game from DOTA 2 and released it on Steam.
Element TD 2 – Multiplayer Tower Defense
Developer: Element Studios
Price: $15
Platforms: PC (Reviewed)
I specifically cite Element TD from DOTA 2 because that’s what it is. I kept DOTA 2 installed for months after I had quit playing solely so I could get some Element TD in once in a while. Though they’ve done quite a bit with said arcade game, you can clearly see the roots. In that, they’ve succeeded. I can load up Element TD 2 and have the same experience I had when I was playing Element TD through DOTA 2. So why would I spend fifteen U.S. dollars to play something I can play in a free-to-play title?
After playing Element TD 2 for a while, I can say I’m glad I have the option to play it on my own but there are some really tough speed bumps along the way that make it a less enjoyable experience. It’s not nearly as polished as I was expecting it to be. It’s lacking a host of options that I think would make the game far more enjoyable. Element TD 2 has left early access and, quite frankly, I think it needs a few more months of baking.
Let’s start with what Element TD 2 is: a tower defense game where you have two portals, an entrance portal and an exit portal. Enemies enter the battlefield through the blue entrance portal and attempt to escape through the red exit portal. Your job, as the builder, is to build towers that will attack the enemies down a set path and hopefully kill all of them before they reach the exit portal. As you play the game you unlock the use of elements, every five waves of enemies that spawn you’re given the option to spawn an elemental boss that, when killed, will give you access to that element’s towers. When you have more than one type of element unlocked it gives you access to crossover towers that have special abilities. Primarily though, the enemies will be of a certain element and the counter element tower to the enemy’s element will deal 200% damage. If your tower’s element is weak to the enemy’s element, that tower will only deal 50% damage.
I love the complexity behind this game. There are so many different builds you can go and it’s always interesting to me to see how far you can get with each build. Right now, it seems the max wave people have gotten through is wave 61. At wave 55, the standard enemies stop spawning and it spawns boss waves from that point only. Each enemy wave has an element component and an extra ability. Some waves will heal their fellow baddies on death, other waves might resurrect once after death at half health. You’re given a number of lives and every enemy that leaks past your defenses takes away life from you. There is a good amount of stuff to account for and it can be a frenzied game at times, especially if you bump up the difficulty and play on turbo mode.
My biggest annoyance so far is the central server being used to host and play games. Instead of a peer-to-peer solution that allows people to directly connect to each other, Element TD 2 seems to use a central server to host all the games. This is frustratingly obvious when playing a game either solo or with friends and having incredibly high latency. There were plenty of times when it was just me playing in an online game (so I could post my score to the leaderboard) and it would take several seconds between clicking and my builder responding to the command. Since release, this has gotten better. Checking the road map leads me to believe that Element Studios plans on supporting this game into next year, I’m sure server stabilization is up there on their list. Still, it was something I had a big issue with and I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring it up.
Going through their roadmap, I was happy to see some of my issues were being addressed. Chiefly, the game feels a little hollow at this point. You build on all your available spaces, you hit level 61, you lose. There are plans before the end of the year to add in quad-element towers. I wouldn’t expect this any time soon, the team seems small, and the technical issues that still exist in the main game lead me to believe this is a fairly novice offering for the team. However, if sticking to the road map and releasing consistent updates, Element TD 2 could very well be a big success story.
Leading me to my main complaint about the gameplay in general. Co-op needs a lot of work and from a fundamental level. I enjoy playing co-op with my friends but there are some big issues that kind of ruin the fun. What’s cooperative about co-op mode? In it, everyone spawns in the center of the area and you run to a random blue portal and start building. There are no predefined lanes and many of the maps have lanes that, if given to you, are just awful to have. Every time you kill an enemy you’re given gold, which allows you to build more towers. If you don’t build more towers, after a short period of time you’re given a percentage of your current gold to you in interest. But if you’re in a lane that has no building points near the entrance and the enemies have to pass by other’s towers, whose reach extends beyond their own lanes into friendly lanes, you’re not only losing out on gold but not collecting interest. In this regard, it’s not cooperative at all. Worse still, everyone still has their own predefined lanes, so it’s not like enemies are passing through multiple people’s towers, they stick to the single lane. The only cooperative aspect of this mode is that you have a shared life pool.
War Mode was another addition to the game that doesn’t make much sense. In War Mode, you share an area with your enemy and creeps spawn at two purple towers, one for you and one for your enemy. As they pass each other in the lane, your creeps will be healed by your towers and deal damage to the enemy creeps. Depending on the elements you unlock, you’re also given some abilities to use. Light will allow you to speed up your own creep wave whereas fire allows you to nuke the enemy creep wave or if you’re especially dastardly, the enemy’s towers. This seems like it’d be a fun mode but it’s often over too quickly and the strategy seems to revolve less around towers and more around the abilities. A more interesting game mode would have given you abilities based on the tower archetypes you were building. Another aspect of the game that just seemed half-baked.
Despite my complaints, Element TD 2 is a legitimately fun tower defense game. I purchased it to play with my friends and all of us ended up dumping anywhere between 20 and 30 hours in the past week or so. Don’t tread into this genre lightly though, it will suck up time and it will seem fruitless at times. I don’t think this is a particularly newbie-friendly entry into the genre of tower defense as there’s no tutorial and the game doesn’t explain much of the basics. However, a tutorial is on the horizon as outlined in their roadmap, and with regular updates, I could see this being a mainstay in my library for a number of years.
The Final Word
While I have my grievances, of which there are many, I still really loved playing Element TD 2 and know I’ll be sinking a lot of time into it in the future, especially if any of my issues are resolved.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
