The Fall of Aether Station

A large amount of the upgrades available are straight-up percentual buffs, which are virtually required to beat the harder difficulties. There is little strategy to be found. The game is a grind to get upgrade points, which you can use to straight-up buff your weapons and ships, which you can then employ to get more upgrade points by lasting for more rounds. In other tower defense games, it is your strategy that determines whether you win or lose. In The Fall of Aether Station, winning or losing is mostly determined by how many upgrades you have. Positioning, fleet composition, even the mixture of turrets you're using matters very little. If you have two ships strong enough to tank the enemy wave, then the entire game boils down to the tedium of swapping between the two as the ship that'll be taking all of the hits. On top of all of this, there are some very bad design choices that were made. For example: you can press spacebar to pause the game...unless you have a ship selected. Despite having an entire keyboard to work with, the developer thought it was a good idea to make spacebar both the pause button, and the "upgrade ship level" button. You can refund all of the upgrade poin…

Neat.

Played through the tutorial and had a ton of fun! I can't wait to see more of this game!! I don't typically enjoy tower defense but this one was really engaging without being super confusing

I bought this because an actor buddy of mine voiced the battle cruiser, Hamid Khosravanipour, look him up on IMDB. I'm not really one for tower defense, but found the game fairly easy to jump in and completed the first 60 waves of stage one in 1.5 hours or less. I almost gave up because it was going on without knowing if I could save and come back, but apparently you can leave after every difficulty completion, just not by clicking surrender? I wasn't much a fan of by assumption of being forced to keep going, but that was not true. Thankfully my buddy told me there was 60 waves to get max upgrades, so I could safely surrender after 60 with not additional achievements to unlock or rewards other than testing myself. I didn't adjust any of my ships in the shipyard, didn't really grasp how until i spent some time in that menu near the end. I image future missions will require some editing of ships to increase damage output between shields and hull/armor but I don't know. It is a solid game as far as I can tell, and impressive since it is an indie dev first game even more so, and the price is fair especially in a market that is about exploiting the consumer.

A fun spaced theme tower shooter that is challenging without being annoying, a rare combimation.

It's like the tower defense games I used to play as a kid, but recalculation of the enemy path in the middle of the level gives it a new challenge.