Mineral Defense

Bullet sponge simulator and a very frustrating game. Everything is just random which means you will only win if RNGesus loves you no matter what meta progression upgrades you have. The meta progression just barely makes the game somehow functional, that is if you grind for all of them. Speaking of RNGesus, its always very frustrating to start a round just to get some path splittings right after your start point... and of course mostly another next to it as well with no area to kill the enemies. The balance... does not exist. Sometimes you can beat some waves with ease just to get crushed at the next one without any reason at all. Most Bosses walk through your maze as if it was nothing while all your towers blast at them. Some enemies are so fast, that even multiple points with 6 or more maxed out Slow-Towers in a row wont stop them. The UI Update is horrible. It went from a clean and easy to understand interface to a colorful kids playground with bright colors, horrible controls and missing info and a clusterf*ck of tower menu. Before the update everything was nice, readable and functional, now its eye cancer. Achievements are made for masochists willing to spend hundreds of hours to kill 50k Yetis which btw only spawns in at later waves. So even if you made it this far, you kill about a few of them, maybe up to a hundred... do the math yourself of how many games you have to play. Don't forget to add the amount of failed attempts to even get to the Yeti spawns. Game started okay, then the Updates came and made it worse.

3/10 gameplay loop needs work same thing endless waves until you get CRUSHED by a wave you have no chance of beating now use research points to give yourself more buffs to get a few waves farther no stratagy necessary as no matter what you do you will be crushed by an unbeatable tank at some point until you come back with more upgrades - 15$ not much here would say 5$

Maaaan, what a game! Bought it, installed it, and played it for 6 hours in a row. Feels like a hidden gem.

It was interesting for the first three hours. Then it turned into a swamp.

6/10 This is a Rogue Tower Defense reskin with some interesting quirks and changes. If you didn't like Rogue TD, you will hate this game. If you love it like I do, this will be your jam. Comparisons from Rogue TD: The Economic Engine is the driving factor of this game, and it starts from Stage 1. Unlike in Rogue, where RNGesus really could make or break your economic engine for the late game, Economic Engine development is very much present at every turn, which changes the difficulty from "How do I survive on a tight budget constraint?" to "Should I push economy over defense this turn?" I feel battling with the decision of economy vs defense expenditure is core to tower defense gameplay, and Mineral Defense does it extremely well. Damage Transparency is more opaque here vs Rogue TD. Rogue TD gave the enemy health in standard bar chunks. A 400hp mob would have 4 blips, a 600hp mob had 6. When health scaled in Rogue TD, each blip would become 150hp and so forth for every mob on the map. Here, the monster health seems scaled to fit the bar hovering above them, regardless of the max hp. That's a poor game development decision because it very much gives the player little to gauge the actual enemy scaling health from round to round. A polar bear in Mineral Defense COULD have 500hp or COULD have 700... who knows? In Rogue TD, you saw the problems in real time when you took curse cards and saw enemy health jump by 15%. Here, because of the scaled health bars, you'd never really see the difference until the enemy is halfway through your killbox. Dead Ending paths. In Rogue TD, paths never dead ended. If you managed to lay out land tiles and would have a boxed in land tile, it would cul-de-sac into a portal that still spawned monsters. Here, in Mineral Defense, it just dead ends and no monsters spawn. Sometimes this feels frustrating because it takes away player agency from managing the land tiles by parceling the twists, turns, and distance of the path. However, in Rogue TD there was always innate danger of a tile randomly being a four-way tile and totally messing with your land parceling. *shrug* I don't know if I like or hate this feature in Mineral TD. Scaling DPS Progression. Damage is very much geometrically scaling from level to level (so far, my gameplay limited here). In Rogue TD it would often be exponential if you "played tall" versus wide. Whereas here, the very loose cap on economy seems more exponential in Mineral Defense while the DPS is only scaling geometrically. I don't know how to feel about this. It is an interesting quirk. This game wants you to play economically wide and build wide, never tall. The level cap on each tower is what's forcing you to build multiple killboxes, but each new killbox is costing more with the potential to be worth nothing if a path just dead-ends three turns down the road. Impossible Bosses. It's not that the bosses are impossible to kill. It's just that some of them are so damned Armor or Shield intensive that you would have to super spend and gear your build just to kill the bosses at the expense of your economy or general defense. That's really poor game design. Instead it's far more economically incentivized to take the hit from the bosses and heal it later. Funky Metaprogression. While both games are very grindy at the beginning, I'm feeling Mineral Defense is much moreso. I don't remember having to restart so much in Rogue TD just to buy out the first set of card upgrades and make it to the endgame of the level. Maybe that's because the two most basic towers in Rogue TD are the core towers, and the game can be won solely with them on lower settings. There's a reason why an achievement for winning with only ballista towers exists in Rogue TD (it's very hard but possible). Here in Mineral Defense, trying to do the same thing with Gatling Turrets will get you killed the moment Armor shows up. I haven't completely opened the tech-tree of the metaprogression in Mineral Defense yet, so I'll reserve some judgment here. Lack of Interesting Mobs. Again I'm going to make the comparison to Rogue TD. In that game: later levels will have enemies that periodically teleport, throw a shield up around allies blocking a damage type to their buddies, start charging when their armor is worn down, spawn bats randomly, become invulnerable for 1.5 seconds, turn into 4 little sprinting dudes upon death, et cetera. Even the bosses did some kind of weird tactical thing after level 5. There's none of that here. The only thing that varies is speed, HP/Armor/Shield amounts, and that's it... No mob in this game has a dynamic tactical quirk that forces your build accordingly. Core Gameplay is More Difficult in Mineral Defense. That's the bottom line here. This is a much more challenging game. I think that's why I like it more. So far... 6/10 Worth buying at full price if you liked Rogue TD. Otherwise wait for a sale.

Every lvl is different. Great game. Love this game.

i love mining miners, i feel so powerful RAAAAAAAAH!!!!

-Нужно больше Пушек и Турелей, они прорываются...