Overall Gameplay (8.5 / 13 points)

• Player Experience: 5.5/10
• Mechanical Polish: 3/3

Comments: I always like to see a game take a tried-and-tested formula and add their own unique twist to it. I enjoy a good tower defense game, and the unique twist on this one forced me to split my attention in a way that pressured and challenged me. Mechanically, this game was also very sound - it's easy to put together a crappy tower defense game, so I really appreciated seeing projectiles home in on targets, for example. Really, I just wanted more. More towers to buy, more variety in enemies, more ways to invest coins, but most importantly... more waves! I was really disappointed to see the game abruptly end after a relatively small number of waves. At the very least I would've liked to see infinite waves, even if it had a simple implementation like linearly increasing the number of each type of enemy. The lack of variety in towers - while nice at the beginning to keep it simple - also hurt my ability to do much serious strategizing. The crazy range upgrades then took whatever room was left for strategizing and eliminated it completely; the endgame sorta just devolved into spamming towers in the middle of the map. I think cutting back those range upgrades, and allowing the player to unlock more specialized towers with coins or something, would raise the skill ceiling and make the game more interesting from a strategy perspective. One more note about range - I would've really liked some kind of radius to be shown around towers when placing them, to show me what exactly their range looks like.

Theme Inclusion (4 / 6 points)

Comments: Although I liked the theme connection, it lied solely in a secondary mechanic, making it feel a bit forced.

Overall Presentation (6 / 10 points)

• General Presentation: 3/4
• Quality of Graphics: 2/4
• Quality of Audio: 1/2

Comments: I really appreciated the introductory tutorial taking me step-by-step through the game space and giving me the low-down without causing any cognitive overload. That being said, I did get lost around the formulas part - I had to play around with it for a bit before figuring out how exactly it worked. The interfaces looked sleek - the graphics and animations weren't quite as much so. I was disappointed to see the towers and the enemies remain static instead of animating in some way. There also needed to be more visual effects in general instead of simply deleting projectiles and enemies on death. I'm not sure how I felt about the interface for the formulas. Putting each formula under its own tiny button caused some needless clutter, since you're almost never going to push any one of those buttons more than once. I would consider redesigning this mechanic a bit to make it more streamlined. I'm not sure how exactly I would redesign it - I just don't think it's necessary to maintain the player's access to a bunch of old formulas that they're never going to use. Redesigning this could also let the player research more formulas almost indefinitely instead of limiting the entire mechanic through a fixed number of formulas. The music was nice - I just needed some sound effects!