Dungeon Warfare is a fairly standard tower defense game. It’s most unique mechanic is how the game deals with heavy vs light enemies, but even that isn’t a groundbreaking idea. Generally, the game’s biggest strength is that it refines and polishes every tower defense trope, creating a great game that feels familiar without being a clone of a better game.
Most of your standard defenses make an appearance in Dungeon Warfare. You have the lightening tower that hits multiple people, the fire tower that burns people, ice tower that slows people, etc. The game’s unique towers are usually pretty well designed and fit a specific niche. You have a push trap that pushes enemies off the edge, harpoon towers that pull them off the edge, spring traps that launch people in a different direction. All of these serve the game’s best original feature, weight. Enemies have different weight stats which decide how hard it is to move them against their will. The light, fast enemies are very easy to knock off the edge but are usually too fast to get hit by those traps. For heavy enemies, they usually have very high health, making it infeasible to kill them normally. Thus, you design your defense layout around a mix of physics-based traps and damage-based traps. This difference is the primary element that sets Dungeon Warfare apart, and it has a huge effect. It revitalizes all the other “normal” defenses because you have to rethink your usual strategies.
Visually, the game is clear and concise, while retaining a low-res, pixelated art style. It’s focused on usability rather than beauty, and it helps make the game easy to pick up and play. The sound design is decent, but nothing spectacular.
Dungeon Warfare is easily one of the best tower defense games I have ever played, and is currently my all-time favorite. I recommend it to anyone that is even a small fan of tower defense games.
