Element TD 2 - Tower Defense

Introduction

Element TD is one of those Warcraft III custom maps whose influence outran the engine it was built on. Since 2005 it went through iteration after iteration across Warcraft III, StarCraft II and Dota 2, racking up more than five million downloads along the way, before Element Studios — founded specifically to carry it forward — took it out of other people's engines entirely. Element TD 2 entered Steam Early Access in February 2020 and left it for a full 1.0 release in April 2021, and what shipped is recognisably the same game a whole generation of custom-map players grew up on, just built from scratch as its own product: six elements, dozens of towers, maze-heavy maps and a mode list built around playing with other people rather than against a static AI.

Gameplay

The pitch is short: combine towers from six elements — Earth, Fire, Water, Air, Light and Dark — to counter waves of creeps that each carry their own elemental strengths and weaknesses, and place them along a track you're usually allowed to reshape yourself. Fifty-nine towers exist once every dual- and tri-element combination is unlocked, and the game's real depth sits in choosing which combinations to commit gold to before you know exactly what a later wave will throw at you. That's the part the mod always got right and Element TD 2 hasn't lost: an elemental rock-paper- scissors layer sitting on top of standard tower defense fundamentals, deep enough that Steam reviewers with thousands of hours logged are still finding new builds worth trying. Maze-style maps where you build the creep's path out of your own towers add a second layer most straight lane-defense games skip entirely, rewarding players who think about geometry as much as elemental matchups.

Where the game works against itself is the campaign's pacing. Several of its 28 missions ask you to lock in a tower build before the map — and sometimes the enemy composition — is fully visible, turning what should be a strategic decision into an educated guess repeated on failure. One recurring complaint in user reviews is having to fully re-spec a loadout between missions with no real payoff beyond starting the next one from scratch; it reads as busywork layered onto a system that's more fun when you're reacting to what you can actually see. Difficulty spikes compound it — achievement data (more below) shows completion cratering after the first couple of campaign missions, which lines up with negative reviews describing a wall rather than a ramp.

Multiplayer

Co-op for up to eight players is the mode Element TD 2 is clearly built around, letting a group split elemental responsibilities across a shared maze the way the original mod's best matches always worked. Eight-player free-for-all survival and ranked 1v1 round out the competitive side, with LAN options for co-op and PvP alike. The mechanical design of all of it holds up. The problem is finding enough people to fill it: a live player-count check at the time of writing showed double digits online, and multiple recent reviews specifically call out ranked being gated behind level 15 while regular lobbies aren't reliably active enough to reach that level in the first place. A tower defense built this heavily around cooperative and competitive multiplayer needs a population to match, and outside whatever counts as this game's peak hours, that population is thin.

Progression

Outside the campaign, progression runs through unlocking the full tower roster, chasing an enormous achievement list — 456 tracked achievements spanning every map, difficulty and modifier combination — and leaderboards for players chasing optimal clears. That breadth is generous for anyone who wants hundreds of hours of goals, but the completion curve tells its own story: the single most-earned achievement, finishing the first campaign mission, sits a little above half of all players, and it falls away fast from there. That's consistent with a game whose core system rewards mastery more than it eases newcomers into it — good news for the players it retains, less good for the ones it doesn't.

Interface

The UI carries a lot of information — element matchups, upgrade paths, wave composition — and several long-time reviewers note it doesn't always surface the right piece of that information at the moment a decision needs it. A specific, repeated complaint is not being able to check the tower or matchup guide while a single-player match is paused, which matters more here than in most tower defense games because build decisions are the entire point. None of this is a broken interface, but for a game this dependent on legible matchup information, small friction adds up.

Value

NZ$21.99 for the full roster of towers, the campaign, co-op, ranked and free-for-all modes, no DLC split and no in-game store is a fair price for a game with this much system depth on offer, and it undercuts most tower defense titles trying to sell the same modes-and-maps breadth through smaller paid add-ons. Whether that value is fully realised depends on multiplayer population holding up, which is the one thing a purchase price can't fix.

Verdict

Element TD 2 does right by the mod it's descended from: the elemental tower system is deep, proven and still the reason people are logging thousands of hours on Steam a year and a half from its 1.0 release. What surrounds that system — a campaign that asks for commitment before information, a UI that doesn't always show the right thing at the right time, and a live population that can't always fill the multiplayer modes the game is built around — is where a new player is most likely to bounce off. Fans of the original mod already know what they're getting; tower defense players coming in fresh should expect a genuinely deep build system wrapped in a few rough edges its own community has been flagging for years.