The Best Cheap Tower Defence Game On Steam

I have a lot of TD games on Steam and I've played cheap ones and expensive ones. This is the best of the cheap ones.

Technotron Defense is a very solid and rewarding TD game. Despite the stylised graphics and music it is actually the most orthodox and conventional of all the cheap TD games I've played on Steam. It is simply that which makes me recommend it so highly. Many of the cheap TD games have some awful gimmick in lieu of interesting gameplay. If Hidden Path made a budget version of their Defense Grid series then it would most likely play a lot like Technotron Defense. I really can't pay it any higher compliment than that.

There is a campaign and a Trials mode. I completed the campaign in 5.4 hours. Each map (there are 13 in the campaign) can be tackled in multiple ways and there is also mazing to a lesser or greater degree on each of the maps. This isn't one of those TD games which has only a few locations on which to place your towers.

The game is reasonably difficult but not frustratingly so. It is far more approachable than the TD mobile ports which have made their way on to Steam but haven't shed the grindy gameplay in the transition. This game follows the tried and tested formula of classic TD gameplay which is basically a slightly more complex version of rock, paper, scissors. You get new enemies to fight but you also get new towers with which to fight them.

Technotron Defense seems to have been made for the PC as there is no grind, no tech-tree, no investing in towers to make them a tiny bit better and no stars awarded upon completing a level. I like that the inexpensive blocking towers can be converted into multiple use support towers by upgrading the basic structure.

The game has holographic dancing girls on the maps as you play the game but in the heat of battle I stopped noticing their gyrations and concentrated on killing the enemies. :)

There are a few minor annoyances. Sometimes it is hard to click on a tower to upgrade it or select and place a newly bought tower and the tower purchase bar at the bottom of the screen can get in the way occasionally. Also the graphics settings don't stick in the game options when changing them from the Unity launcher although that may be a problem with Unity itself.

This game just does the basics of a TD game very well. I find the graphics pleasing to the eye and the excellent 80s synth soundtrack is an added bonus. You have full control over the music as you play the game with pause, forward and rewind buttons so you can play which ever track you like or none at all.

I would have liked an option to replay the campaign maps in a "Super Grinder" format with a hundred waves of enemies like in the Defense Grid games. There may be something like this in the Trials mode of the game but I haven't played that mode yet.

I paid 39p for this game while it was discounted during the recent 2018 Steam Lunar Sale. The "full" price is only 79p which is around $1. I would have happily paid four or five times what I did. At the current price this game is a steal.

Highly recommended.

I've been on a tower defense kick recently and bought seven tower defense games at once; Technotron is the first out of the batch I played. It was cheap and I was attracted to its bright retro aesthetic.

In terms of tower defense, Technotron is the barest minimum. If, like me, you found your love for tower defense by playing browser TD games two decades ago, you'll find Technotron is nostalgic of the era and has nothing new to add, nor does it do well at the bare minimum. The retro aesthetic makes it hard to differentiate one type of tower from another, not to mention one upgraded tower versus its lower-tiered brethren. Waves start, come and go, and lives are taken without any indicator at all, oftentimes making it hard to make sense of the neon mess on screen. Upgrades are standard (+ to damage, range, etc.) and don't seem to help enough to justify the cost.

Technotron is the type of TD game where you can set towers and/or walls down to block certain paths and make enemy pathways longer. The amount of money you start with is so low that any strategy utilizing this is slow to start and even slower to develop (as you'll want to upgrade towers to defeat increasingly harder enemies before you can afford to buy towers/walls to block paths). There's no indicator to show you when a tower is ready to upgrade; you have to click through each one to figure out if you can afford to make it better. There's also no indicator for when you unlock new towers, nor which buttons control what. For example: I clicked pause at the beginning of a level to plan my strategy and figure out what the towers were, and the wave started anyway. I later found out I had paused the music, not the game. The soundtrack's pause button is in the top right corner of the screen, where most TD games have their control commands.

Let's talk about the bugs, which have been mentioned in other reviews. For an excessively simple game, Technotron has a lot of them. Waves fail to spawn. Menus get stuck. Most egregiously, halfway through a level my mouse input stopped working. Literally everything I tried to click on had no response. I couldn't upgrade towers, pause the game, or do anything but go to the menu, so I lost the level after spending time and energy setting up my strategy. That's when I decided my time with Technotron was done.

Out of nearly 1600 games in my library, Technotron Defense is only the second I've refunded. The soundtrack is decent if you like 80s synth music (I do), but I didn't buy the game for its soundtrack, nor will I hear it if the game itself isn't good enough to spend time in. Unlike many gamers, I don't need my tower defense games to add new things to the genre in order to play and love them. Technotron doesn't, but it also doesn't excel at the standard or even manage to work up sufficient excitement, particularly considering its myriad of bugs and issues. This game gets a hard pass from me.

Decent simple tower defense game, with a fun aesthetic. A few key elements are not explained at all (such as how to build a detector) but with enough clicking around I found everything. There are a few waves I wasn't able to solve with towers alone, but manipulating the pathing mid-wave beat them. It took around 6 hours to get though all of the missions.

The Trials mode pits you against unlimited waves in a randomly generated map. It sounds cool in theory, but there's no score at the end so you don't have a way to compare plays. This one feels like a wasted potential.

Some bugs I ran into include occasionally not being able to click on a tower (which makes it impossible to upgrade or sell), and Trials mode setting my starting money to whatever I had left in the last game I played (which can make things hilariously easy or impossible to buy anything). All bugs I saw were fixed by restarting the game.

Despite the oddities the main game is worth a play through if you're into this kind of game.

This is a very bare bones tower defense game with a unique visual approach. Nothing pushes the genre forward, but it is a decent timewaster. Be warned that in my short playtime I had several waves fail to spawn, leaving my game stuck on x3 speed and no way to finish the level.

Get it on sale.

simple. boring, and explains little.
music is pasable but also is listening to a pair of 80' synthwave videos on youtube.

Music and art style create a soothing atmosphere contrasted by challenging and fast-paced gameplay.

Pros:
- Great soundtrack
- Simple clean art
- Very difficult, later levels require solid shaping plan and build order
- Great price

Cons:
- No simple way to restart the level before failing it.
- First wave comes too quickly, forcing level review offline
- No targeting priority options
- No Achievements

I bought it for the soundtrack and was not disappointed. The game is very simple, there barely are any controls, but the 80's neon punk feel it brings is just amazing. For the price it's a nobrainer. Just buy it, because it's almost free, while also being an amazing 80's nostalgia trip with some TD mixed in that actually is not just a self playing game. I did find some challenge in it and have to admit that thre is fun in the gameplay as well, as there is awesome music.

For the price, this game is very easy to recommend. Even if you just play long enough to hear the entire soundtrack once or twice it is worth the experience, because this game does have quite a bit of personality. However, I bought this game because I thought it was going to be super chill and casual but that was definitely not the case. I wound up pretty much giving up on being able to complete the campaign because the later levels are just plain rediculous.

Edit, the developer has listened to its users and tweaked the game and I am happy to say i am going to lose many hours playing this again. Hats off to you. Highly recommended

I really started to enjoy this game. The playability was fun, the graphics great and very unique and the soundtrack cool. However I have had to abandon this game as in later levels it is setup so it is impossible to progress. This is a design Flaw whether it be intentional or not so for that I cannot recommend it as you will get a maximum of a couple of hours fun out of it before you will get frustrated and abandon it.

This game is bad, but that's not the reason I'm giving it a down vote.

IT ACTUALLY BROKE MY COMPUTER

I might not have been on purpose but it will not stop showing the message that another computer is running technotron defense and no matter how many times I restart my computer or steam it continues to make any game unplayedable

That's not the only problem with the game, infact it really BORING and it's almost impossible to wina level on your first try.

The main selling point for me was the soundtrack cause vaporwave and stuff like that is my S*** but I can say that the entire soundtarck has around 6 F****** SONGS.

The level stages are ruined with these ugly ass looking robot pole dancers that are around the map sometimes, ♥♥♥♥ IN THE GAME IS GOOD IF THE GAME HAS SOME GOOD ♥♥♥♥ BUT IF THE ♥♥♥♥ ARE BAD THEN THIS IS A VERY SILLY MARKETING POINT.

Scrolling round the map sucks, not much else to say about that.

Sometimes depending on where you place a turret it can make it impossible to upgrade it or sell it.

You can place walls but due to the lack of space its close to being pointless.
3/10 broke my pc but it's 80p lol