OTTTD Review

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Game Details

Title: OTTTD
Developer: SMG Studio
Publisher: SMG Studio
Website: http://www.otttd.td/
Genre: RPG, Action, Arcade, Strategy
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Audience: PEGI 12
Release Date: 06.05.19
Price: £5.99 – Rapid Reviews UK was very kindly provided with a review code for this title.

OTTTD is an acronym for Over The Top Tower Defence, and over the top it is. For those of you who don’t know what a tower defence game is, essentially you defend a home base by placing and upgrading static towers at set points along a road which enemies will come down in waves. Placing the right towers in the right places is essential, for example, a tower that slows enemies before several big damage dealers to make sure you get the maximum effect.

Many tower defence games have added hero units that act as mobile towers to make the experience more engaging, but OTTTD also adds persistent levelling and gear to their hero units. Also, a hilarious name generator for these units that made me laugh a lot every time a new one was unlocked.

If what you look for in a review is whether the game plays well then you can stop reading here (please don’t I worked hard on this). What separates OTTTD from the pack of well-made tower defence games is its personality. Everything is “over the top” from the huge guns that most of the heroes wield, to the ridiculous enemy designs. The bosses were especially a delight, and one was just a giant zombie shark that was also a blimp.

There is a planet you travel to where the enemies are all steampunk crabs, lobsters and such. It’s called Steamcrust. I don’t know about you, but that made me chuckle.

“What separates OTTTD from the pack of well made tower defence games is it’s personality.”

OTTTD for Switch contains not just the base game that can be found on other platforms, but also the DLC levels. This caused what was, for me, an unwelcome spike in difficulty. One level even forced me to contact the developer for support and took me hours and hours to beat. I would have preferred there to be a clear split between the base campaign and the super challenging levels, as I would have done some grinding first had I known they were intended to be a much higher difficulty.

One thing I will give them is that the high difficulty extra levels are creative. Multiple bosses appeared in one level, and the one mentioned above that I was stuck on for hours allowed you only to have a single tower. This made the tower I had and use of my heroes extremely critical, and I made me hyper-aware of the skills my heroes had. It would have been interesting to see some more hero focused missions earlier in the campaign, as in many cases I just stationed them as if they were towers and left them alone.

But aside from that slight hiccup, I enjoyed my time with the game and was honestly shocked to see the price (£5.99) as it offered a lot of hours of gameplay. There are 25 levels and 3 tiers of difficulty to keep you playing, and you also get a star rating at the end of each level, so there’s a lot in there to keep you going if you enjoy it.

I didn’t finish all the levels on all the difficulties but checking out How Long To Beat, the only person who recorded their completionist time was sitting at 39 hours. That’s a lot of hours for under £6.

One thing to note is that I only played the Nintendo Switch version, there is also a version on iOS, Android and Steam that I didn’t get to try but based on my time with the game there’s no marked difference with the Switch that I would expect would make those versions less enjoyable. The big difference between the Switch and other versions is a fast forward feature, which I did use a few times but wouldn’t say is essential.

It’s a cliched thing to refer to “fans of the genre” in a review, but while OTTTD is a great tower defence game, I don’t know if it would convince anyone who doesn’t like games in that genre otherwise. As a fan of the genre, I enjoyed my time with OTTTD, and would probably have kept plugging away at the levels trying to improve my scores if a new review game hasn’t come along that required my attention!

Rapid Reviews UK Rating

You can purchase OTTTD from the Nintendo eShop on the following link, https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/OTTTD-Over-The-Top-Tower-Defence-1555161.html