This Isn't Just Tower Defense Review

Thousands of enemies, no way to lose, and a title that dares you to disagree

This Isn't Just Tower Defense, developed and published by Pri Games and released 23 October 2025 at a modest NZ$10.49, pitches itself as a hybrid: place towers to defend against waves of thousands of enemies at once, but power those towers with an energy-and-production supply chain lifted from automation games, and remove the genre's usual punishment by sending a lost wave back to the last checkpoint rather than ending the run. It's a distinctive premise, and its 121-review Mixed sample reads exactly like a game whose ambitious pitch and thin execution are pulling reviewers in opposite directions at once.

The spectacle lands well across the sample. Reviewers consistently praise the sheer scale on display -- thousands of enemies rendered smoothly, satisfying tower animations, and performance that several reviewers specifically call out as impressive given the enemy counts involved. The "no game over" design draws its own dedicated praise: with a lost wave simply returning players to the last checkpoint rather than ending a run outright, several reviewers describe the game as unusually relaxing to play, and multiple reviewers mention deliberately running it in the background while doing something else, letting the auto-play button handle a wave while they attend to other tasks. At its low price, reviewers on both sides of the recommendation line largely agree the asking cost is fair for at least a first playthrough, with several framing it as good value even among otherwise critical write-ups.

Where the sample turns sharply is content and longevity. A large number of reviewers report finishing the entire campaign in four to six hours, with one describing beating the game and then reaching wave 500 in endless mode only to find it functionally identical to wave one -- no meaningful income scaling, no new pressure, just a longer wait. Several reviewers count only seven to ten distinct tower types across a single map, and more than one negative review argues there's effectively no real decision-making once a viable build is found, since the game's design lets a single strong tower type carry an entire run. One reviewer summarised the tension bluntly, calling it "an idle game trying to disguise itself as a tower defense" rather than a strategy game with idle elements layered on top -- a framing that recurs across several other negative reviews using similar language.

A cluster of specific, repeated complaints reinforces that shallowness argument rather than standing apart from it. Multiple reviewers flag the absence of basic quality-of-life tools common to the genre: no way to select and upgrade every tower of a given type at once, no target-priority controls (leading to complaints like lasers repeatedly locking onto weak enemies that die instantly instead of real threats), and no way to copy an upgrade path from one tower to another of the same class. Balance complaints surface too, with several reviewers singling out the flame turret as close to useless relative to other options, and a number of reviewers separately criticising the escalating cost of clearing map obstructions as disproportionate to the benefit, given how many rocks and obstacles litter the single available map. Achievement design draws its own specific frustration -- several reviewers describe certain achievements as requiring unreasonable amounts of idle time with no meaningful progress attached, and at least one reviewer reports an achievement that simply failed to unlock despite meeting its stated requirement.

It's also worth weighing how differently individual reviewers landed on the exact same length of game. One reviewer who logged around 900 minutes called the game "fun but there's only 100 waves then it's over," noting that once story content ends, "what's left? Watching your towers attack the enemies and that's it." Another, at roughly 1,100 minutes, wrote that after four to five hours they'd reached "the end" and could "not even say it has potential because of the limited amount of game there actually is." Yet a handful of reviewers with similar or shorter playtimes reached the opposite verdict, framing the same four-to-six-hour length as appropriate for the price rather than a shortfall -- one specifically wrote that "for $7, you can't give this game a negative review" and that the campaign was "enjoyable for much longer than a Starbucks takes to finish." That split isn't really a disagreement about what the game contains, since both camps describe the same content; it's a disagreement about whether a short, polished idle tower defense at a low price needs to offer more than that to earn a recommendation, and the review sample suggests reasonable players land on both sides of that question in roughly equal numbers.

The most consistent and pointed complaint across the negative sample, though, concerns the developer's post-launch presence. Multiple reviewers independently describe reaching out on the Steam forums and the game's Discord server with bug reports and balance feedback and receiving no response, with one reviewer going as far as calling the game "abandoned." That absence compounds the other complaints rather than sitting beside them: several reviewers note that fixing the endless mode's lack of scaling, adding the missing quality-of-life tools, or rebalancing the flame turret and obstruction costs would all be straightforward changes for a small team to make, and the silence reads to them as a sign those fixes aren't coming. It's worth noting the review sample skews toward players who logged well over the four-to-six-hour campaign length, some in the tens of hours, which suggests the core loop retains enough pull to keep people playing even as they document its shortcomings in the same review.

Taken together, This Isn't Just Tower Defense delivers convincingly on its most visible promise -- a calm, spectacle-driven defense game with a genuinely novel no-fail structure and strong technical performance at scale -- while falling well short, in the eyes of a large share of its own reviewers, of being a game with enough content, balance, or endgame to justify much beyond a single short playthrough. At its price, that's a defensible trade for players who want an afternoon of relaxing number-watching and nothing more; for players hoping the "isn't just tower defense" framing promised genuine depth or a satisfying endless mode, the review sample suggests that promise remains unmet, with no clear sign from the developer that it's still being worked on.