This is why I’m very happy to see the return of the Orcs Must Die! series after it took an extremely ill-judged detour into the realms of free-to-play with Orcs Must Die! Unchained. Tower defence games are old news, and while you can still find them if you know where to look - games like Dungeon Warfare are perfectly decent if you’re willing to accept the lower production values - and while tower defence elements might crop up in other games from time to time 1, the dedicated tower defence genre has pretty much been driven underground. If, in 2011, making a tower defence game was the cool indie thing to be doing, then in 2021 it’s making a Slay The Spire ripoff, or a roguelike, or something combining the two. Then, abruptly, people seemed to lose interest the genre didn’t exactly die, but the zeitgeist definitely moved elsewhere. In a relatively short space of time we got games like Plants vs Zombies, Sanctum, Defense Grid, reverse tower defence in the form of Anomaly: Warzone Earth (that one wasn’t very good) and Defender’s Quest’s spin on it, where your “towers” were actually a collection of RPG-style heroes complete with special abilities. As somebody who loves tower defence games, nothing could have been more pleasing to me than the mini-boom in tower defence games from around 2009 through to 2012. Whatever happened to the tower defence genre?
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