Mineral Defense

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.