Digfender

Digfender is the best tower defense I played in 2015. It’s not a creative game, it doesn’t have any surprises, but it’s well executed and perfectly balanced. All the towers are usefull, each specialisation has it’s importance, and there isn’t one better than the others. The gameplay is deep and has a lot of variety.

In this mobile game you try to defend your castle against waves of enemies that come from below your castle. In most TDs I played recently towers are completely unbalanced, or difficulty progression is unfair to make you pay, or game crash or … No bad surprises, only a good, and polished, experience sum up pretty well Digfender:

• Elemental towers (electricity, ice, fire, …) with 9 upgrades and 2 different specialisations per tower.
• Support towers: Increase range/damage/… of towers around
• Plenty of enemy types with many variation in theirs powers (Shield units around, resistant to X, healing, when die freeze your towers, when die ignite other units around, …)
• Traps: Aside with tower traps help you handle these little enemies you haven’t well prepared for.
• Main campaign! It has A LOT of levels that also include a lot of variatons in gameplay (due to the layout of the map).
• Infinite mode to compare your skills with other playes in the leaderboard !
• Global player progression: You can unlock improvment for your powers and towers that you keep from one level to another forever.

I’m not a super fan of the graphics style but that might just be me, and the gameplay overcompensate that. The good part of the graphics is that they are relatively easy to read and let you identify enemy types quite quickly. Also technically I never had a crash or a framedrop which is really pleasant.

If I had 3 wishes their would be:

• Add cloud saves, Really! I don’t want to loose my save when I switch phone.
• Moar infinite levels! Currently there is one but what about different setup of enemy type, terrain layout, etc (as in the campaign). Like one with more elementals, more sorcerers, less free square space for towers, … This way people can choose to play the way they like in infinite mode and can fight for different leaderboards
• Cooperation. I first play tower defense in a lan with 3 friends, with some obscur map/mod of Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne and I would love to find in a TD the cooperation aspect that has long disapeared in most TDs … I dunno how to do it really, I just miss it (^_^)

This mobile game is free to install, has some ads but isn’t overloaded by them, and you can make one IAP¹ that removes the ads, give you a different castle type with different powers, and also give you a coin doubler (I think for about 4€ if I recall correctly).

Digfender is made by mugshotgames a 2 guys indie developer company: Steve Yap & Mike Yap. They are based in Sydney in Australia.

Now go play their game! Enjoy! And Merry Christmas!