Hexa Td - Free Game

I see huge potential in this game. I am a big TFT fan and this game actually makes me feel it's very creative：TFT + tower defense. Fun but also challenging to play!

6/10 Tower defense

TLDR: Tower defense on a hex grid where you use walls and towers to create a winding route. Confusing wall connections and a fixed camera angle make it harder to play than it should be.

Good:
+ free
+ interesting additional mechanics in a tower defense game: walls (and you can place some of the towers on top of walls), traps, general boost towers and more

So-so:
+/- low-poly 3D graphics don't really look nice
+/- Chinese music is okay-ish even if a bit boring though there are too few different tracks, and it gets annoying after a while
+/- onboarding is below average, and not much is really explained. There are tutorial videos with Chinese texts in them. Many of the English tooltips are poorly transalted and/or cut off
+/- your enemies are just normal animals like cats, dogs, cows, penguins. Killing them feels unfair, unjustified, even cruel. There is no story to explain why those animals are bad. What have ever penguins done to us?
+/- towers have lots of stats yet many of these stats are unclear. In fact, with the upgrades of towers bound to the 3 randomly appearing items in the queue, you don't really make meaningful tactical decisions with the towers, so all those stats end up just useless info you don't have much influence over

Bad:
- you can't rotate or move the camera. The default view angle leads to visual overlaps. The view of the board is messy and cluttered. Since camera's angle is fixed, I'm not sure why this game has to be 3D. A top-down 2D view would be far clearer and easier to operate with
- wall connections could be bugged (?). In any case, they are often unclear. Some towers (like Bomber) seems to always get connected to a wall (?) while others (like Shooter) sometimes don't. I tcouldn't win level 2 even after 3 attempts, just got frustrated when messing around with those walls. I'd say, the mechanic around walls should be re-designed. For example, why are even animals moving _between_ tiles? Animals should only be able to move through empty tiles. Then placing towers would work just like placing walls, and walls wouldn't be needed. Why is the attack range of towers so short?

[table][tr][th]I'm a Steam curator, you can follow me[/th][/tr][/table]

"Hexa Td - Free Game" is a simple and unambitious tech demo of a "game". A barebones tower defense game from China, built on low poly, minimalist hex maps... it's bland, flavourless and unenjoyable.

What do you do in the game? Very simple barebones TD stuff. Just get Kingdom Rush. The grid placement stuff is almost interesting, but there's nothing else in the game to back it up.

The technical execution of this game is shallow and simplistic, just enough to tick the boxes required to get something (anything) published on Steam, rather than investing the huge amount of effort and budget needed to create a fully fledged, comprehensive, high quality product. This feels like a tech demo more than a full game.

This game features very lacklustre minimalist "art" for graphics instead of anything remotely contemporary. I'm sure the "developer" thought this would come across as "artistic", but it doesn't, it comes across as "really lazy". Yes, contemporary 3D graphics take a lot of time and effort to create. That doesn't mean it's okay not to bother! Developers must try to understand that gaming is a visual medium, and gamers spend a lot of money on high end gaming rigs for a reason. And that reason is not so they can look at lazy, phoned-in half efforts like this.

The developer chose not to do the job of a real game developer and create meaningful bespoke levels, narrative based gameplay progression and so on. Instead, they decided that "Procgen IS content!" and lazily tried to use procgen algorithms to create infinite, samey, repetitive, soulless levels, because that's a lot less work.

As a result of this poor decision, the game gets tired and repetitive almost immediately. Developers must learn that procgen is a terrible substitute for creating real content. It should not be used as "ez-mode" for content creation, as the developer tried to do here.

Now on to pricing and value for gamers.

This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too.

In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at only 8 concurrent players... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away.

Given that this free title won't increase your game collector count, is it worth your time to add it to your library?

This is a hard pass. There's no immediate financial commitment, but there are thousands of more compelling games on the platform that will give you a lot more enjoyment for your time.