Outhold

This game is a great game, and I love the idea of the game, but my issue with it is the length of how many levels there are. There are only 10 levels, and the demo is 1/3 of the entire game. When this game grows to have more levels, it will be a lot more enjoyable.

I want to like this game, but the upgrade map is mostly an illusion of choice. The game is more of a min/max puzzle. You have to puzzle solve the correct upgrades to complete each challenge, which is the only way to get more upgrades. In the beginning there is a fair amount of choice in what towers and upgrades you can win with, but as you progress you will realize that you either need luck or nearly the exact correct choices to complete the run. This isn't an inherently negative way to add difficulty, but its not fun, at least not for me. I like picking towers and seeing which ones work better and which are worse, and some choices should and will fail. This game doesn't work that way. It's mostly a minimum threshold of upgrades, and then you can win. It doesn't feel like skill or choice.

Once you beat the final level, you are allowed to complete additional challenges, but these are "thread the needle" challenges. At this point the only challenge is picking the correct combination of upgrades or you lose, which makes most upgrades useless. The skill wall switches to checking the correct boxes. You just need to figure out which upgrades to turn on or off to win.

I would recommend this game to players who like to min/max with trial and error.

Aight, hear me out, I know I gave this a THUMBS DOWN but only for reasons that I PERSONALLY can't overlook.
This game still has many positives to offer and might even be exactly what you are looking for!

Since I still think the game itself is quite ok/good why not start with the good parts!

PROS:
- Fair Price! Got it in a bundle so it was even cheaper!
- Good Background Music. And the sound design and effects are also top-notch. Exactly what one needs to feel immersed in the gameplay.
- Very nice use of Minimalism! Even tho the graphics and everything is very minimalist, there are still a lot of animations, shading and touch-ups that just show that someone really cared to make this look and feel good!!
- An ok-ish balance between challenge and fun. Some levels and challenges needed a lot of "brute forcing" which diminished the fun a bit over time.

Now for the few bad parts. The stuff I sadly cannot overlook and really bugs the hell out of me!

CONS:
- Has currently the 'Idler' Tag! Nah, nuh uh! In no way, shape or form is there anything Idle in there! This game really requires a lot of active gameplay, so how the actual hell did it get the Idler tag!!
- I don't know how to say this but this game plays more like a 'Strategy Puzzle' game than anything else! Like, yes, it looks like a Tower Defense game and has a lot of Tower Defense mechanics.. but on god, this is a Puzzle game! Every level is another Puzzle you need to solve to get to the next level! Early on there might be multiple ways to solve one level but later on and with the challenges on top of it, you literally only have ONE WAY to beat a level!!
Would be all cool and dandy if you didn't have so many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ options given to you! To figure out what combinations of Upgrades and Towers you need to beat a specific challenges is a nightmare and literally boils down to brute forcing every single combination till you pass!

In the end I think I did get my money's worth out of it and I did 100% it, but every time I started it up I felt kinda let down, ngl..

(Edit:)
//(I seem to have confused people as to why I'm disappointed that this game has the Idler Tag despite it having absolutely Zero Idle Game Mechanics. I'm sorry, I try to be more detailed this time around:

- On SteamDB you can see the Update History, in which it is clearly shown that when the game was put on the Steam Store it was already given the Idler tag by the Publisher, even before any Screenshots were added to the storepage. It was even given the Clicker and Simulation tags, which I'd call a really far stretch.
- The games Demo was also put on Itch.io with the Idler tag and those tags are only set by the Publisher.
- A Publisher has the ability to contact Steam Support to request the removal of a misleading tag. I can't personally say how effective steam support is in this matter tho.

If you want to help with removing incorrect tags, you can do the following:
Click the '+' next to all the tags > In the window that opens, hover your mouse over the tag you want to report > A flag should appear which lets you report the selected tag.

One could say it was given these tags to reach a wider costomer range, in which case I think it would be a misleading advertisement. Or it could have just been a mistake. But the fact that it's still there is why I took one point away from my total internal review score to be honest. Hope this explains it better now.)//

TL;DR
Good price, enjoyable to look at, ok-ish gameplay loop, misleading tags!