itch.io

This is the kind of game you'd expect on a shareware CD running on MS-DOS in 1992. It would have SVGA graphics and require 2MB of RAM. Why does my 2020s Chromebook with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage with an octa-core processor that can run most stuff on Google Play have a slow mouse for this game? Or is this just another way the creator seeks to make this game so slow that dragging people through its excruciating pace is its sole appeal? I can't optimize anything because the price of upgrades is ludicrous. Every upgrade to damage seems to... what? Double? It goes up so much each time that it would take forever to get a turret to one-shot enemies that don't move, spawn, or die fast enough.

If the goal of this game was to be fun or potentially fun, it's an utter failure, probably because it wasn't optimized to be anything but a drag.

By the way, I think your advice worked and I finished the game shortly after my first reply.

I'll try that.

Uh.... Worst "music" I've heard in a long time. That was enough for me to abandon playing your game immediately. Do you even know what dissonance is? Are you without any musical acuity whatsoever? This is the musical equivalent of massaging someone with jagged rocks.

It seems once the setting changed, DNA stopped appearing and I was just running away with the ranged attack going. I would have liked to play more but after a couple more minutes, I eventually died, even while keeping my distance from enemies most of the time.

This is another game like Reacticore where the gameplay is actually pretty straightforward but it's so unoptimized that you can't even move around the cursor on low-end hardware without major slowdown, making it unplayable. I can play PolyTrack in the browser and a wide variety of Android games in a VM on this Chromebook but I can't seem to play a clicker game because I can't gather resources by swiping past them because you didn't make this very pixelated game efficient enough. Is it some sort of game engine? Was this written in a few days or weeks for a competition or dare?

Also, I don't know why anyone would call this an arcade game. Has the dev actually been to an arcade? You know, with coin-operated cabinets? Because those are meant to keep you playing, keep you losing, and keep you putting in more coins. The original Double Dragon game ran better in the 80s than this browser game runs on hardware 40 years newer and more powerful! And this game is nothing compared to the complexity and real-time ARCADE action of that beat 'em up!

I think "arcade-incremental" game is an oxymoron.

Which one? The experimental one or the one listed on itch.io? You're really suggesting complaints about the lack of music or settings are "genuine" but gameplay including targeting being skewed by upgrades isn't? You think settings and music are supposed to be in the demo but gameplay mechanics that allow an appropriate level of accuracy for upgrades aren't? I think you're the one who isn't "genuine" but I'm guessing you're just naive. The basics of the game are how it plays. It's been years since I first played this and it hasn't been corrected. Maybe the downloadable version would be better with more accuracy but I'm playing in the browser in a Chromebook, not Windows, Linux, or macOS.

My complaint about the game perpetually setting up the same kind of progressive but meaningless difficulty without anything new to add is quite valid.

Why would I like a game that doesn't work properly or lacks imagination or newness? I just removed many Android games from my Chromebook because I decided it wasn't even worth going through all of them for games that show poor judgement, which is pretty much all of them. I'd spend too much time looking through them just to find any game that isn't a rehash of many games that preceded it, and there's no guarantee I'd find that.

Even if this game worked perfectly, the targeting worked, it seems the dev saw fit to do the same thing that's been done before with little to any variation on the same theme. Any game that resembles this demo is basic at best, and the dev couldn't even get targeting right or offer anything challenging in a perpetual mode other than predictably more difficult enemies that negated any upgrades, which just enunciates the futility of a game that should offer a sense of accomplishment or connection between the effort of the player and the results of the game.

It seems like a good game, now that I've put in more effort, though I suppose the demo isn't a representation of the entire game. I'll have to spend a lot more time I think learning how to manipulate the line of travel and where to start. I have to say this is a little discouraging if there's hope I can find a walkthrough that will even begin to show me. There are YouTube videos, but I'm not sure how helpful they are.

I of course learned how the towers fit together and how to add another by clicking on the tower I want to connect to, and that they don't actually have to touch other than the corners, which is useful information.

It's only $1USD ($1.50CAD) on Steam and likely worth more than that, which is appealing.

I think by watching just a little of the video on the Steam page I learned the use of Void, its importance.

Thanks for a great game! It's worth the effort to spend some time with it, but it can seem a little unrewarding at first. At least failure is early and quick, allowing little commitment to mistakes.

I'm sorry but I find the menu difficult/impossible to navigate. I went into options, fiddled with the settings, but can't seem to get out, so I guess I'll reload the game and start again. Also, it wasn't clear when I tried actually playing how I could add a second tower. I love minimalism, but so far this is frustrating.

I love this game. It was the perfect thing to kill some time, clear my head, and feel motivated enough to leave my room and go outside and visit a friend. Thanks!

I hate visual novels. They shouldn't be allowed in the games category because they're not actually games. They're choose your own adventure stuff and should be in the fiction category. You don't "play" them because you're not "playing" them so much as reading them and barely interacting with them. Get this crap out of the games category. It's getting in the way of real games with more play than reading. This "game" is stupid and NOT very "visual" at all!

So, I've tried playing this game on MacBooks and Windows laptops at Best Buy and it's fine. I like the game... until I get home and try it again on one of my Chromebooks. For some reason, I can't collect the energy in the same way as I can on those other laptops, which prevents me from progressing in the game. Why did you make such a straightforward game unplayable on modest hardware? You're literally clicking and collecting energy, the latter of which seems like an extraneous step. I don't see how I can't collect energy, but perhaps you just hate Chromebooks or low-end hardware that can run far more sophisticated Android games like Horizon Chase flawlessly in a VM but for some reason can't control a circle mouse cursor in your browser game well enough to "collect" energy from cells. Go figure.

Also, if I can't control the mouse, I can't click on the energy, which frankly is a stupid mechanic. It might not be so stupid, though, if I could actually control the mouse or the circle in the first place and controls were responsive.

This is a good-looking game and I might enjoy it if the controls weren't crippled. As it stands, it's just proof that some browser games require computers with more processing power than a low-end Chromebook, even if they're literally clicking and upgrade games.

I'm guessing the five weeks it took to make this thing was primarily spent on making it look and sound good on hardware well beyond what might typically be required of a simple browser game.

It's just weird to me that I can play simplified first-person shooters on a Chromebook but a 2D clicking game runs like my mouse movement is maxing out the processor all the time.

I've also played this game on a Chromebook with n4020 and 4GB, so a Celeron a step below yours. It does play poorly on both Chromebooks.

If you're such a child, maybe you should stay off the internet. Doesn't itch.io make you sign some sort of TOS? And stop swearing if you're so sensitive. Don't forget to cover your mouth when you cough, sneeze, or feel uncomfortable.

I bought a new Chromebook last Wednesday with an octa-core Mediatek Kompanio 520 and 8GB of RAM but this game still plays very poorly. I had to look up how to collect energy, since triggering its release didn't seem to get me any, and Google overview told me I had to "sweep" the screen, which is nearly painful to do since it seems your game was not optimized to run well on hardware that runs Android apps in a VM perfectly.

This game seems unplayable, and there's no greater reason for it than you failed to optimize it the way a game like PolyTrack is optimized, and I suggest a low-poly racing game is far more complex and demanding than a 2D clicking game.

Did you really take 5 weeks to make such a simple-looking game and not ensure it ran well on modest hardware?

This just feels like a stupid game. Congratulations on frustrating the kind of "gamers" that might be interested. But perhaps the real deficiency is that I'm not running at least an i3 or Ryzen 3 processor to meet the demands of a game that has better music than visuals.

Odd that you'd say I'm doing something wrong in the same place you say this is a demo. If you can't understand something, perhaps you shouldn't make such definite statements, huh? I guess you're "normal" though, so the madness of Trump being POTUS isn't a major cause for concern. Or global warming. Or insisting on keeping murderers and other bad criminals alive with human rights when their victims get no rights. Are you okay bud?

It's as I said. After you've "finished" the game, after level 60 the tortoises gain more armour. It's like making a game steadily more difficult simply by giving enemies greater HP. Or the difficulty level in a game determining the same. It's too basic.

This by now is an old demo, too. Perhaps the dev is uninterested in working further on it. They shouldn't be surprised if they get comments that criticize it for pretending to be one thing but falling short of anything excusable by the word "demo".

I really wish I could speed this game up. It takes such a long time to grind and it's really just waiting. Couldn't this game be sped up twice as fast as it is? Give another option or make the speed-up options twice as fast as they are? This game would be a lot more fun and less time-consuming.

I wish when I hovered over the upgrade buttons, it didn't just flash the numbers of what it would change. I wish when I continued to hover over each of those three buttons, the numbers would persist. It seems like a glitch or other mistake.

EDIT: Oh I see what's happening. When the game is in Auto or perhaps when the game is in movement with towers hitting enemies, the display of stat changes when I hover over the upgrade buttons is interrupted, but when it's not in Auto and it's between rounds, the stat changes persist when I hover, as they should.

What a great game! I've been playing this game pretty much all day. I should take a break and play a game of chess.

I kind of like this game but I wish holding down fire didn't commit part of my arsenal to detaching or slow me down using laser fire. It's distracting that I can't just hold down fire or that I need to repeatedly press fire. I want to focus on dodging enemy fire and killing enemies, not thinking about how to use the part of me that detaches and stays in one place as I move around or switching to and from laser fire which doesn't seem so powerful that it's worth slowing down for.

I prefer autofire and automatic targeting. Using the mouse or pointer and clicking is annoying and distracting. For a game like this, I don't want to have to use a mouse or trackpad. If I do, it should either be a detail-oriented game or it should be more fun and action-packed.

You seriously just ended the game repeating the same thing? WHERE'S MY CAT? Don't you make me look back!

The screen is black for me. More specifically, the game playing area is entirely black. With or without my adblocker running. So I can't play your game. Tsk.

Oh. But the music is playing!

All this game does past level 60 is add more and more armour to these turtles/tortoises so that even if you're upgrading your base damage, the amount of damage you do to them steadily declines. It's pretty boring and doesn't make for a good game.

I have 20 bullet speed and 12 attack speed (not sure if that's the maximum), and my base damage is 515. I'm on round 63 or that's what it says now that I'm between rounds. Thing is, all that firepower is useless if it KEEPS MISSING. There's nothing but grey turtles to fight so they're not moving fast. They're hardly moving at all. And I'm playing at normal speed, not sped up where the missing is worse. Every single shot I fire should hit the mark, especially when there's so many of them crowded together.

I think the dev lacks awareness that if this game on Itch.io plays poorly, fewer people are going to want to use the Windows or other local version. There are better games to play, both free and paid.

I think I could make a much better game than this, and I've never made one before. I'd use the same crutches others use to get a working version then redo it in a more efficient language so that it runs exceptionally well. And I'd make sure the targeting is perfect, especially for slow-moving enemies.

This is pathetic. A tower defense game where the biggest challenge is putting up with the game itself and its terrible targeting despite spending upgrades to get 100% accuracy. What a loser game.

It seems early in the game if I switch tabs to do something, I'll die. I wonder if this is deliberate in the game. I'm improving the targeting/accuracy at first, to get it out of the way and this game is quite slow at first because I'm not improving the attack speed or how much damage each hit gives. It's frustrating that i'm set back an die on the 3rd round just because I decided to pass the time not watching the ridiculously slow fire hit or miss targets but looking for an old friend on Facebook for a few minutes.

I don't think the dev knows how to be considerate or show basic consideration. Too many scammy devs are focused on making money and not enough on making a game fun enough to want to play it in the first place. Lowlifes spend their money instead of playing the game to get ahead. Lowlifes also make it necessary to spend lots of money to progress meaningfully. Such lowlifes deserve each other.

Why make a game that's so straightforward only to openly display your contempt for players and any respectability left in the craft of gamemaking now dominated by studios who want games to be more like compulsive, daily addictions instead of enjoyable fantasies?

This game should play smoothly and quickly enough and get more exciting with progress, the reward for progressing and getting good. And while the randomness of upgrades should enhance replayability, this game should also be one of choices that make a difference so players can get "better" and not merely be a passive participant subject to the random number generator.

And if you put your game in a browser, it shouldn't fail automatically just because someone switches to another tab while so many cpu cycles are wasted wading through the slow, dull, inaccurate, clumsily done beginning that you've utterly CRIPPLED so first upgrades need to be WASTED on something as pedestrian as ACCURACY.

I hope every single thing on your smartphone, especially games, especially FPS's and RPG's and TD games all start you off by giving you 0% accuracy so you have something to level up to. You'll probably never rise to the level of doing anything apart from what you can get away with doing, much like a reckless wild animal humans have been feeding too long and has now become expectantly aggressive.

You can let the entire forest burn down as long as it doesn't burn the house and maybe the car. While wildfires might need to burn out, I'm hesitant to hold people's houses in higher regard than many acres of forest surrounding them.

Ah. I don't really like that it's a mistake to put out the fire before a path is made to the home. It seems a little silly that he can't get home because of trees that are older than him are getting in the way.

The dice card is a gamble. You can get health cards when your health is at full, making it a complete waste and not fun. It feels more like a ripoff and a scam, especially when this happens multiple times in a row. At times it's been such a good deal that I was sure I wanted to keep using the dice cards. But maybe it should be removed.

It seems the dev hasn't seen fit to synchronize everything proportionally when the game is sped up, but maybe that's how the dev rolls. Maybe he/she/it/they gets confused when things are synchronized and it's normal to make things messy, like a bad mind is messy with emotions and illusions.

What a perfect name for a game perfectly synchronized with its creator: Wildfire. A destructive, indiscriminate force with bad aim, especially when things get faster or impatient, like anyone expecting a proper game more than two years after its initial release.

I don't know if it should be removed, but if it's useless, it shouldn't be part of the dice roll. If two out of three of the cards are warm soup when I have full HP, I'm going to feel ripped off, especially if it keeps happening.

I don't think "Salvador" is a thoughtful person. When this game was first posted, I noticed how targeting turned to garbage when the game was sped up. This is a sign that the dev doesn't know what they're doing and doesn't care to learn or do the job right.

When you think about it, many/most of these games are made on platforms that require little technical expertise to use. This game is little more than a quickly drawn... well... tower defense game. There was little imagination put into it, the targeting sucks, and the dice rolls are for things that are useless.

Maybe bad games were okay in the Flash era, when everything was made so easily, but when games and gameplay on Itch.io compare unfavourably to scammy mobile games, it's a sign that someone with less talent and more delusions is inflicting their lazy, privileged mediocrity on anyone who'll put up with it.

It's too bad. I usually like good tower defense games. I guess that much hasn't changed, but it seems like this game should be fun. I should probably hop over to Crazy Games and spend more time with a certain wizard tower defense game. Progress may be slow and failures plentiful, but at least it's professional and without glaring flaws, like missing stores for currency or a downloadable version that still doesn't run properly, as if it took some sort of ability to code to make.

So it looks like you gave me currency I can't use. I also read on the other Wildfire demo that there are problems with all versions of this game, including this one, the other HTML one, and the downloadable Windows version. If I speed up the game, I'm told, my fireballs will miss the targets, which was my experience years ago when I first played this game.

Maybe you're not interested in quality control so much as using users as beta testers. If you can't keep a sped up game synchronized, it's a disappointment that your game or games have been so prominently listed on Itch.io, which I'd like to believe is better than unsynchronized games and those who make them.

When I clicked to Quit instead of restart, the game froze and when I refreshed the page, it seemed I was starting all over with no option to spend any currency.

You can't even hold to your own in-game logic. I'd rather merely play games so I can move onto other things, at least other games, instead of being responsible for disappointing users on a simple tower defense game with cards between rounds.

Maybe you need to go back to secondary or elementary school and learn how to use a ruler and a calculator instead of being little more than a bad Mario Maker user of pre-processed developer platforms.

This game is fine but it would be a lot nicer if speeding it up didn't screw up everything, like targeting.

Well, I did it. I got past round 60. I skipped using the fast forward setting and focused on attack speed, bullet speed, firepower, accuracy, and life steal (blood mage). When forced to pick an additional option, I got the burst shot.

While the dice helped somewhat, maybe almost as often it was half-useless, giving me health with one or two cards when I was at full health, especially with life steal. So I mostly stopped using it so I could focus on stuff that helped.

You got rid of the space above the blocks? That's how I'm supposed to be able to get a lot of blocks without bouncing them with the paddle each time! That's the goal! How is this game supposed to be fun?

You seem to get off on making players desperate, even mocking them a little when they die. I hope you've had fun because I haven't. I feel stupid for playing your game when it's designed not just to be challenging and difficult but to be impossible to "win". Even arcade games back in the day allowed you enough control that there was some chance, with enough practice, to get high scores. Asteroids, Missile Command, and Centipede are good examples. If I have to keep starting over, there should be a way to improve, but the controls are bad enough and the experience and health powerups disappear so quickly that I'm trying too hard using cursor keys and a space bar to pick them up.

Some of the worst games I've played are that way because whoever made the game crippled the controls to make it difficult to play. The best games usually gave great controls so that it's 100% how I play that determines whether I win or lose. This game? It's 100% on you whether it's worth playing or just a game of losing.

Why don't you make it into a mobile app like The Tower? Put in lots of ads and make it pay to win. It'll fit right in with games like Top War and Hero Wars. You can even make up misleading ads for the clickbait effect, if you like ridiculing your users so much.