Rise of the Cones: Planetary Defense

I've been dying for a new TD game, having spent 200 hours in Defense Grid 2. This game hits the spot, some cool ideas and upgrades and you can't argue with the price! Having lots of fun so far.

So, for a $10 game it's not terrible, but you're definitely getting what you paid for. Balance is just not there. The game is way too easy once you unlock enough tower upgrades and towers. You can set up your entire defense for the 60 waves on tier 3 difficulty by wave 20 and then you're just sitting there with 2X speed and auto-start next wave running for 30 minutes waiting for the game to be over. The towers are cool in concept, but you only need 2 tower types (plus the refinery) to beat every mission. You use the gun turret for early waves and setting up your eco, then you just spam laser towers and win. There are upgrades that are also completely and utterly useless, like the red path on the refinery. That thing is literal hot garbage, it costs the most and provides like 1/10th the income of the other paths. All you need is 1 gold path refinery and 1 green path maxed and your eco is set up for the rest of the game. The buff towers seem pointless. The increased gold gen is literally pointless because the refineries are too strong. The other upgrades don't really seem to do much. Map/level design is pretty boring. The maps are tiny with crappy paths that leave you with 1 or 2 good places to put towers and no strategic variation. The towers themselves all have either similar short range or infinite range so there's no careful planning. It's just "put all early towers with low range at the 1 or 2 good spots then spam laser towers everywhere else because they hit the whole map". I beat every single aspect of the game in 6 hours. If you follow my advice and just spend your upgrade points in the blue and red paths for the gun turrets (plus the first 2 yellow upgrades), the yellow and green upgrade paths for the refinery, then all 3 upgrade paths for the laser tower and max out starting cash and cash per wave you could probably beat the game and unlock everything in 3 or 4 hours, but it's just not fun because there's no challenge. Overall, I give it a 4/10. Not awful, but not something I'd recommend even if you really like tower defense games.