Sooo... This game... First of all, I have no idea what version we currently have up here on f95, if it's the latest or something else... No idea. Well, I'm kind of hoping it's no the latest, most finalized version of this game, because if that is the case, I'm rather disappointed for a number of reasons.
Before that though, I will say that I've never played the game this was supposedly inspired by or whatever... But I've played enough TDs (and WC3 modes back before Reforged) that I've seen similar ideas before (minus the hentai... well, no, I've played TDs with hentai before too, so... whatever...). ANYway, I won't be judging it by the standards of the original source material or whatever.
First of all, this is another one of those "games with hentai tacked on", by which I mean that if you removed all the H content from the game, the game would still play in exactly the same way as before and there's no tweaking necessary aside for accounting for the blank spaces and probably removing the gallery button. This, needless to say, makes the game a lot more boring then it could be, even before accounting for the fact that it's one of those uber generic isekai plots where a random pervert drops into a fantasy setting and somehow his nerd skills allow him to be a master strategist for a kingdom he knows nothing about. Oh, and of course, there's oodles of hot girls that can barely wait to trip and fall on his dick for the flimsiest of reasons and there are no other male character to threaten the self insert's fragile masculinity. Extra minus points for not even trying to justify this sad state of affairs.
Beyond that, there's barely any story, barely any attempt at world building, and on top of that, several scenes reference events that happen "off-screen" or worse, continue off-screen in a "and I totally fucked her all night until she was covered and filled with cum all over, trust me bro" manner.
I get it, art is expensive, animated art even more so... but this is still half assed and annoying to see.
Point is, the smut is barely integrated with the story, and the harem feel is basically non-existent aside from one half-assed scene at the end, which isn't that great in that aspect either because it essentially comes out of nowhere and after a bit of fun goes "and I totally fucked all 5 of them until they were filled and covered in cum, totally bro". Can you tell that this sort of thing annoys me?
ANYway... let's leave that aside.
Let's talk about the gameplay. The gameplay is easy enough. You have a map that enemies move through. You have fixed points in which you can build towers. You have a heroine that can move around and fight. You have a special ability that you can use that depends on the heroine you're playing with. And of course, you have the towers, each of which has its own gimmick...
And this is where the problems start... While I don't expect the towers to be something I've never seen before in an H-game of all things, I do expect that the towers and girls to have the right combination of variety available to them to allow you to complete any stage at the default difficulty level when using any of the heroines...
Now. I'm not a master of this game, so maybe I'm missing something obvious, somewhere. But by all accounts, it's impossible to complete several stages when you reach them with Kitsune or Sumi, on account of massive air-waves and absolutely NO anti-air AoE, along with the fact that these heroines can't hit air, and their skills can't hit air either. I have doubts that the girl with the swamp spell could manage some of these stages either... On top of that, it's hard to compete with arrow-machine-gun Takumi and her massive AoE freeze spell, or the fire flinging fox-girl and her massive AoE meteor spell that just deletes a chunk of the map.
What makes this worse is that you don't unlock towers through research or anything, but by stage completion. Which means that, unless you're way better than I am, you're gonna have to play with whichever heroine is optimal, rather than whichever sloot you like the most or whatever. Personally, I went with Takumi.
Of course, how good you are at this game or not doesn't ACTUALLY matter, because you have a Win button, so you can just press that and move on... but if you do that, your heroine doesn't get any XP (if you care for this anyway) and there's not much to the game without the gameplay. Well, the art is hot and the animations are decent... but I'm not sure if that's enough to bother downloading the game if you're gonna completely ignore the gameplay.
Still, if you DO want to complete the game manually, the next problem you'll run into is the fact that... the stages tend to be a tad repetitive in design, paths and tower positioning, so eventually, you're probably gonna get bored running them. I did so around... uh... I think it was 20-something... 23 maybe? Anyway. After that stage, and re-running some of the earlier one for silver and gold stars, Takumi was lvl 10 and I skipped my way to the final stage and I picked up whatever upgrades I could on the way.
Said Final stage was surprisingly easy tbh. Mainly because the Lightning and Missile towers are pretty OP even with just the bronze star upgrades that give them 25% damage and the universal gold star upgrade that gives 20% attack speed to all towers. Not invested enough to try and clear it on silver and gold though.
Moving on, the next bit that's bad is the upgrades. The majority of the upgrades cost stars. How do you get stars? You get up to 3 Bronze stars when completing a stage for the 1st time on the basic difficulty level. Up the difficulty for Silver and Gold. Then there's a crystal currency that you get for finishing any stage at any time... but there are only 11 upgrades that use this currency, two for most heroines, 3 for Kitsune for some reason... none of which are particularly interesting or creative.
Yes. You have the fewest upgrades for the currency you can GRIND, while the vast majority of upgrades depend on stage completion...
I shouldn't have to explain why this is terrible game design...
This makes things even worse in terms of what I said earlier, because, well, you can't even grind to make some of the weaker heroines good in the stages that are problematic. Because they barely have any upgrades, and said upgrades don't necessarily do anything to account for whatever weakness is problematic. Sure, they level up and they become increasingly able to one-shot basic monsters and whatnot...
But that's not gonna help for jack and shit in the few stages that have flying bosses for example, a couple of which are early enough that, you guessed it, you don't have any towers or anything that can slow said bosses down, much less be guaranteed to kill them among whatever wave they're a part of. Unless of course you're playing with "wipe out part of the screen" fox, or "freeze a significant part of the screen" arrow machine gun half-elf. (Also. Why half-elf? Why not full elf? What, didn't have budget for pointy elf ears when you had budget for twitchy fox and cat ears?)
Basically, the game has issues... big ones.
It's... still decent by H-game standards. I guess... But it's not good aside for maybe the art and animations, but even those are dragged down somewhat by the quality of the writing in the H-scenes, which is... not great.