Demon Avengers TD review: a nearly perfect tower defense game

Tower defense games are pretty common on mobile app stores, but Demon Avengers TD pulls ahead of the pack by sticking to the basics and delivering a good ol’ solid game.

Developed by China-based Weeme Studio, Demon Avengers TD is a tower defense game that doesn’t waste time revolutionizing a genre that doesn’t need revolutionizing. Instead, it hits all the right notes on what makes tower defense games fun.

(See: Top 5 tower defense mobile games from Asia)

In Demon Avengers TD, you have enemies walking along a fixed path towards a portal, and it’s your job to make sure they don’t get there. You build towers to attack the enemies, with each enemy you slay magically contributing money to your coffers, allowing you to purchase new towers or to upgrade the ones you’ve already built.

There are a wide variety of towers available, as well as spells and traps which you can use to obliterate or slow down the enemy. There are also hard-hitting hero units that you can freely move around the map. In total, there are 30 different types of towers in Demon Avengers TD, so this game is pretty packed, content-wise!

There’s a lot of out-of-battle customization available as well: you can upgrade your towers with stars you gain for completing levels, or buy new hero units using gems which you pick up randomly during the fight. If a stage proves too difficult, you can grind for stars or gems in earlier stages to buy the upgrades you may require to progress further.

Strategically, there are two types of tower defense games—those that require you to build a lot of towers, and those that require you to spend your money on upgrading a select few towers. I only played Demon Avengers TD for about two hours, but so far it looks like upgrading your towers provides more damage and coverage than spamming the map with low-level towers.

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There are quite a lot of enemy varieties, such as flying enemies that can’t get hit by cannons, and minions that have tougher defenses not easily pierced by arrows. You need to build a good mix of towers to succeed in Demon Avengers TD. This is the same solid game design I mentioned earlier—there are many towers, but none of them are strategically useless.

Demon Avengers TD is pretty action-packed, and if you think the game is slow and boring, you’re always welcome to hit that ‘2x’ speed button, doubling your game’s speed. The button should be used at your own peril, though, because the enemies can get out of hand very quickly, and you might not have the time to counterattack by building the appropriate towers.

Pretty rare for a tower defense game is the presence of a story in Demon Avengers TD, which gives some background as to why you’re trying to stop assassins from entering a sacred portal. To be honest, I didn’t find myself caring for the story, even though it came with pretty nice comic-style art.