Review: Steampunk Tower 2 (Nintendo Switch)

Steampunk Tower 2 is a strategy, adventure game in which you need to build turrets upon turrets to fend off hordes of enemies. It’s simple tower defense mechanics. But what could have been a fun strategy game turns into a dull experience.

A world war is happening in this steampunk universe, which, I’ll admit, looks nice. The map is well-done, and the overall look of the game is cool. The story to go along with it, on the other hand, I didn’t care for. After a handful of dialogue, I found myself skipping the story. It didn’t entice me, and neither did the characters, which gets me hooked on a plotline. Unfortunately, the dialogue between the characters fell flat for me. There wasn’t much emotion behind their words. With the subpar story, I didn’t really care what they had to say anyway.

There’s not much to do during these battles. Once your turrets are placed on the tower, they do the rest of the work. You can manually move them to the middle of the tower to reload, but they do that automatically if they run out of ammo. Once their special gauge is filled, you can click on them and aim at some enemies for a more powerful attack, but that’s it.

When you’re not in battle, you can hover over various areas on the map and see what else you can do, which isn’t much. To upgrade your turrets and tower and just about everything, you need materials. To get these materials, you need to accomplish missions. These missions are either story-based or side quests that you can repeatedly do after a cooldown time.

In other words, Steampunk Tower 2 is grinding. You earn experience points when completing missions, thus leveling up when you have enough experience. This will unlock new things such as tower space, new weapons, or the ability to upgrade the weapons you already have. You can also create buildings and upgrade them to help these processes along. Aside from leveling up, it also costs money. Money comes from the taxes on the towns, which, similar to mobile games, have a waiting time.

The real-time and cooldowns made me feel like this would have been better as a mobile game and not on the Switch. Sure, the Nintendo Switch is portable, but I felt like I waited for more than actually playing the game. And when I did play missions, it was grinding because I had nothing else to do.

As I said, Steampunk Tower 2 looks nice. The music was good, and the overall steampunk feel of it was fun – I wasn’t a fan of the characters, but I did like their clothes and designs. It played smooth as well. The controls were responsive, and the battles were fluid.

If you enjoy tower defense games and are looking for a game that’s more on the “mindless” side rather than “strategy,” then Steampunk Tower 2 might be a good option for you to try. Otherwise, there are other tower defense games out there to give a go.

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