Most tower defense games are made by little dinky indies like me. In contrast, this one, like Bloons or Plants vs Zombies, looks professional and polished. And cartoony.

Map Type: Predefined (you can't build your own walls). They tell you where you can build towers. On many maps there are few choices. Unusually, they tell you which tower you must use for each spot. Many maps have multiple goals you have to defend, sometimes on opposite ends of the map, which means if you pay attention to one you don't see what's happening to the other. You can't slow or pause the game so you end up spastically bouncing between them like an old RTS. It's not enjoyable. At all.

Towers: There are only 3. But they level up with experience and you get 2 choices each time you level up. There is no slowing tower (although ghost towers can sometimes slow creeps) or sniper (but the orc catapult has decent range, although poor damage). The only area of effect tower is a fire tower choice at level 3 (some catapults has splash damage though). There is no damage over time tower.

Creeps: Normal, strong, fast, fliers, etc. An odd assortment of others - invisible, untargetable (can only hit with AOE or splash), healers, ones who makes others fast, spawners and a boss who stays at the start and makes the gems walk to her. One throws smoke bombs, stopping your towers from shooting and preventing you from seeing what's going on. One of the enemies loses her clothes when you attack her, causing you to whistle at her and all nearby towers stop shooting so that they can stare at her. That unit was childish and stupid. Enemies randomly drop coins and mana (mana is used for user spells and for cutting down trees, which you need to unlock spots to put towers on).

Story and RPG: There is a minimal story, enough to say that maps must be played in a certain order, tower upgrades are unlocked at certain maps and you can't use them on earlier maps. Each map you beat gives the player experience which is used to unlock user spells, map conditions (start with more money) and tower perks (faster, add DOT effects, etc.).

UI: This needs work. The UI is cute (although the text is way too small) but you can't see tower properties (speed, damage, type, etc.) and you can't see creep properties (although you can look them up in a dictionary). It's also not entirely clear whether a tower will hit anybody - with so few places to build, i built towers in second tier locations and while their hit circle touched the edge of the path i never knew if it was going to hit anything.

Strategy: i'm conflicted on this. Many maps have few options and, i suspect, a single solution. Several seem like they can only be won by luck (early creeps drop gold and mana). i got perfect scores on most maps but the second to last set (pirates) took me 50 tries each, none of which were fun. i didn't even bother on the last maps (dwarves) - i'd rather uninstall the game then try to get perfect scores on them.

One thing i dislike is that it's often hard to tell what's going on. Creeps drop things on top of each other making it difficult to see what's there (i frequently click on something i want to stay there in an attempt to get something i want). Some of the effects also make it hard to see. And then the awful smoke grenade monsters. i often had no idea what was happening even when i was staring closely at it.

Additional: i hate, hate, hate games that switch or add genres. Who puts quick time events in tower defense?

Overall Cursed Treasures is cute and it's a tower defense game. It's more arcadey than strategic. There are often very few places to put a tower, you can't choose the (initial) tower type, many maps only have a single solution, luck sometimes plays a critical role, you can't slow or pause the game, you sometimes have to rapidly alternate attention between sites and the game has god awful quick time whack-a-mole events. The game wants to look cute and tell a story (and maybe add novelty for novelty's sake?) and it sacrifices traditional "i want to sit and think" strategy to get it.