I remember playing this before. I don't recall anything specific, just a chill game with some odd-feeling mechanics, but cool overall. This iteration though... It just feels off.
The cost increase for upgrades feels really bad later on. I don't think the math itself is all that awful, but the way mechanics of gathering and killing enemies interact with each other just makes the process of gathering 243/729 units of anything more annoying.
The cursor turns off when there's no enemy in the area, so if you get an attack almost ready and then the enemy darts away or you try to move it slightly to the side to get another enemy in range, if you lose the enemy, the attack just poofs and you have to wait for the cooldown from the beginning. That really feels bad. Especially since at later stages every villager and enemy just run around all over the place and you are bound to lose targets/attacks.
Having to keep track of all the villagers running in "random" directions, not to mention trying to keep them safe through that journey, feels counterintuitive. Monsters attack base, also attack villagers, if you need specific resource, you can kinda protect a few specific villagers, but soon everyone on the other side dies and your tower falls, all because you tried to get some extra wood or something. And even then it doesn't really matter, cause you can just farm bit by bit to the point none of this matters, cause you can just keep the cursor at the tower and kill enemies, while all the villagers are dead.
It's a decent game, but the rapid movements, combined with enemies sometimes appearing out of nowhere (I'm pretty sure some spawned for me in a certain radius around the tower, which cut down on the planning/time-management slightly in early game), having to mouse all over the place without losing target as to not reset attack cooldown only to have everything on the opposite side die so fast, you don't even notice, the abilities/spells forcing you to take cursor off of more important things, all of the spells auto-aiming wherever they please... It's chaos. Chaos that I, as a player, don't feel like I have enough (or any) control over. I beat the demo, farming Chapter 3 for fun, one upgrade from maxing cursor damage and the little ghosts are still a 3-shot, which frustrates me way more than it should. I want to maximize wood for example, but I get like 100-150 per run (out of ~2100 I need for a single upgrade) and no matter how many lumberjacks I get, I can't speed up or keep alive enough of them for the numbers to matter. I can get 150 wood with 5, I can get it with 20.
On top of this, the problem with the cursor requiring a target to charge is exacerbated by the fact that you need to break away to click on spawning new units. If there's a hotkey for this, I couldn't find it, but it really needs one. Because otherwise you're being forced to split your attention between attacking and making a time-sensitive decision, and it just feels... bad. It feels bad.
I also just liked the older version. It was different, even if there was some janky behavior to it. This one feels like every other incremental progression game now, with the passive upgrades and the farming. It's less interesting. I wanted to play the original but better, not everyone else's idea again.