Guards

This strategic guard defense game is cleverly tactical and endlessly engaging! 🛡️👮 Outsmart intruders with smart placements 🎮, satisfying puzzles ✨, and escalating challenges. The intuitive mechanics and replay value make it a gem for strategy fans!

I love the female character designs, but the gameplay is absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Stay calm. Play smart. Win more.

Pure grind game. Many hours of doing the exact same thing over and over and over, to slowly gain currency to upgrade your units. Additionally, winning on the highest difficulty is pure RNG. You can do everything right but get screwed on either the upgrades you are offered or enemy spawn locations or what your sniper decides to shoot and then you just die.

Guards by Battlecruiser Games is an inventive yet minimalist take on the turn-based strategy genre, offering a distilled form of tactical play that relies on simplicity rather than sprawling systems. The game places you in charge of a team of four heroes standing against endless waves of enemies, fighting their way toward eventual bosses. At first glance, it appears like many other indie strategy titles—small scale, fantasy-themed, and straightforward—but its defining feature lies in how it transforms traditional combat into something more rhythm-based and positional. Instead of issuing multiple commands or micromanaging units, the player’s only real move is to swap the positions of two characters across the battlefield’s lanes. That small decision, repeated and refined, becomes the beating heart of Guards’ design. Every swap changes the tactical situation, triggering attacks, defenses, and abilities in a delicate dance of timing and placement. What makes this system interesting is how much strategic nuance emerges from its apparent simplicity. Moving a unit to the front line commits them to attack but also exposes them to danger; pulling them back allows them to rest, heal, or ch…

I liked it, but as you can see, only for about 10 hours. I could have pushed for 20 but I have a gazillion unplayed games. I recommend it depending on the price. Because it's repetitive and a little slow, it's good to make this your SECOND game and just play it occasionally rather than trying to have a marathon session.