don’t feel like you’re fully on board with all of the game’s many ideas

While I absolutely love the fact that so many indie developers are coming to the market with new ideas and modes of play, I’ve also seen quite a lot of examples of problems that come with that ambition. Ultimately new ideas are only as good as your ability to either articulate how they work, or for them somehow to just be naturally intuitive. Diving deep into a run can be exciting, but when you still aren’t entirely sure what you’re really doing it can put a damper on your sense of accomplishment. This is the biggest issue I’ve had with Everwarder, and that’s a shame because I appreciate the fact that it feels like it has some decent ideas running under the hood.

Billed as a different and procedurally-driven take on tower defense, for the most part I’d agree to that characterization, at least if we’re over-simplifying. Your ultimate goal is to defend a central crystal, but for the most part you’ll find that your best defense against a continually-growing number of encroaching enemies will be a good offense. That means you’ll want to position smaller crystals in different directions, allowing them to continue to expand the space and expose resources that you’ll need to get stronger. In order to counteract all of those enemies you’ll be able to position different defensive units who’ll hopefully be capable of keeping up with that steady stream of enemies intent on destroying your precious crystal.

As described above, it may sound like a refreshing take on strategy, and to a degree you’d be right. The problem is that rather than carefully deciding what elements to implement and keep, it feels like the developers went ham and didn’t know where to stop adding more complexity, much of which is poorly explained to boot. Sure, to a degree I was able to follow what I wanted to do conceptually, and could even feel like I was having some success, but I also constantly felt like I was just randomly choosing what to do or what to focus on. There are elements like the rock-paper-scissors system where specific enemies will be weaker to certain defensive units, but considering they all end up converging on the crystal anyway, simply setting up a varied perimeter seems to work just fine. The upgrade decisions in-game also typically feel simply driven by stats and not by any particularly-interesting option they bring to the table, which is unfortunate. It’s then nice that you’re able to work on meta progression to keep making yourself stronger, but honestly the interfaces for a lot of core functions like that are needlessly complicated and the controls for navigating them can often feel odd at best. This is a game bursting at the seams with ideas, but it doesn’t have the restraint to help make the experience feel more focused and fun, making it all seem like a bit of a mess.