IDUN Prologue - Frontline Survival

Excellent demo experience. It's basically what you'd expect if someone took the survivor-like and tower defense genres and then mashed them together with a sci-fi backdrop of fighting against a swarm on a hostile planet. Drop into an area, setup shop, protect against waves of enemies while upgrading and making your "build" and then trying to stay ahead of enemy attacks and protect your mining structures (or mech) until it's time to extract. Game gives off vibes of Starship Troopers: Terran Command minus the narrative, exploration and map size. Focuses much more on smaller map skirmishes against waves of enemies from different directions while you try and extract as much resources as possible from the surface. Meanwhile you have that "survivor-like" progression model of getting the option to pick upgrades based on your progress towards resource collection. Definitely makes for some interesting replayability if you want to experiment with different setups to clear maps. Good mix of units available to deploy as well as a variety of enemy types to deal with. Hell, even the mission type itself changes depending on whether or not you are deploying general units or piloting a mech. It is kind of fun doing the mech missions because you are trying to move around the map and collect resources and drop them off at a fixed point rather than turtling around a handful of stationary mining machines. The player's overall mission path in the UI looks a lot like what you'd see in a rogue-lite as you can't go backwards in order to follow every mission branch. However, you can see the details of each path in advance so you can plan strategically on what type of rewards you want and/or mission types to complete. I suppose the game could benefit from some minor polish here and there when it comes to the UI and animations (seems like it's designed to work with mobile devices) as the production value isn't quite as high as some other tower defense games. But overall, it doesn't prevent me from enjoying the fantastic gameplay underneath. [h3]While there's a lot more focus on active abilities and moving "towers" and "heroes" around, it's a great take on the Tower Defense gameplay loop with a bit of that RTS style tactical combat mixed in governed by an "extraction" based mission structure.[/h3]