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World of Van Helsing: Deathtrap by Mischief Maker 02/24/2020, 7:32pm PST As an aficionado of combining news and podcasts with tower defense, I've had my eye on this one for a while, but until my recent SSD upgrade I never pulled the trigger because the system requirements (falsely) said it was 20 freaking GB (it's a little over 9.5). But now I've got the HD space and I'm having way more fun with this game than expected. X-Morph Defense is still #1, but Deathtrap, to use the parlance of MSNBC, is a strong #2. Deathtrap is a tower defense game in the Kingdom Rush subgenre: no mazing, fixed locations for tower building, but a massive collection of towers that can be further customized with additional properties mid-game. Deathtrap does KB one better with 25 tower types instead of a measly 8 (though segregated into 5 different types of placement slots) and 3 upgrades instead of just 2. The main deviation from the KB formula is you directly control your hero character like an ARPG and the 3 hero types have extensive skill trees to customize them into different builds. Also, this game lets you control movement directly with the keyboard and all the keybinds are remappable. Dunno why the vast majority of other ARPGs don't do this. Why not give an "action" RPG the precise and straightforward controls of an action game when you can instead give this single-unit game suggested destinations for the weak pathfinding to figure out and make the entire game play out like the one worst mission in every RTS campaign where you have to maneuver a single unit through a stealth gauntlet? It's a spin off of the Van Helsing ARPGs and uses the same engine and recycled art assets, so the whole game has a steampunk gothic horror ambience punctuated by spectacularly gory deaths for the creeps. Note that several angry reviews said the game has trouble with AMD cards, dunno if that was fixed by patches or not. I'm having a blast with it. X-Morph Defense is still the best tower defense game, but Deathtrap definitely gets thumbs up!

World of Van Helsing: Deathtrap by Mischief Maker 02/24/2020, 7:32pm PST     Oh yeah, the other KB feature is using barracks towers to block with friendlies. NT by Mischief Maker 02/24/2020, 7:35pm PST