Name: CodeKnight
Price range: $

You can really see the roots of The Riftbreaker here - it feels like that game must have naturally evolved out of this - similar graphics, grid based placement, turrets and defence against waves of enemies. I'm really glad I played this though; it's a great mix of genres (again, like The Riftbreaker), really highly polished and just simply good fun. I'm usually not a fan of tower defence games, but they've done so much right here that I actually stayed engaged throughout the story and finished the whole game.

Pros

The destruction physics and animations are fantastic, and never get old
Wide range of weapons and abilities to use against different kinds of enemies
Large number of different enemy unit types, and towers to counter them
The bosses are really well made
Everything is destructible
Voiced campaign
It's not -just- tower defence - you have a huge degree of agency in how to destroy units yourself, so it's a viable strategy sometimes (when you're low on resources) to let the towers deal with one set of paths, and take the others on yourself until you have more towers
You play as the aliens against the humans. Die human scum!

Cons

It's a tower defence game. It's a good tower defence game, but still. More shooty, less tower building please
Almost invariably, on every last wave of each level, all the attack patterns change. This means I basically have to spend 10 minutes selling all my existing towers and starting from scratch
It shows controller buttons on the UI, even if you're playing on keyboard and mouse
Building towers can be fiddly - selecting your towers is a little difficult with a mouse. Using a free movement mouse cursor that's trying to build things on a square grid can just be a little clunky sometimes
In the last mission, heavy tanks just drove straight through one of my laser walls, and my turrets were being attacked from off-screen

X-Morph: Defense

Pros

Cons