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Defend The Keep from Vanille Games offers a familiar Tower Defense formula, with a few extra spices thrown in to make it worthy of your attention.

Note: Key provided by the developer to our Steam Curator.

While there's a huge amount of Tower Defense games available, even on Linux, a lot of them play it a little too safe with the mechanics. Usually, you will get set locations to place down towers but that's not the case here. In Defend The Keep, you can place towers wherever you like and build walls to stop the flow of enemies running into a village to destroy it.

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While you have the ability to place down towers, walls and traps that's not all you have at your disposal. The main tower in the middle of the village you're protecting also has elemental powers, allowing you to fire off special abilities at the waves of enemies approaching you and these can be upgraded too.

Altogether, the special abilities along with tower placements and wall building can make for some fun tactics. Stall the enemies with walls, while smaller placed towers bring down their health as you slow them down with lightning as they run through a line of poison you've placed down. It's quite satisfying I must say! The tower design gave me a bit of a laugh too, one of them is just a tower with a massive swinging hammer on top of it, smashing down onto enemies near it.

It isn't just the enemies and abilities you have that make Defend The Keep interesting to play, the day and night cycle keeps you on your toes as well. It's harder to see where enemies are coming from at night, even harder on the top difficulty, so it requires plenty of focus.

When you progress across the world map, you will also earn Crystals to upgrade your placed towers as well. You can get up to three, depending on how many buildings you save per-mission. You can improve their rate of fire, range, health and more.

Interestingly, the developer said they weren't originally sure if they would be able to get Linux support in right away. Due to supportive messages received, they went for it. I'm glad they did, as I thoroughly enjoyed it. Not too difficult and not too easy, difficult enough in some cases to make me replay a level to do better. In a vast sea of other games, it stands out quite nicely for me and I think it's worth picking up.

You can find Defend The Keep on Steam now for £5.99/$7.99/€6.99 and itch.io.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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5 comments

Kohrias Jul 16, 2019
Just bought it on itch! Tutorial and first level were nice and fun :)


Last edited by Kohrias on 16 July 2019 at 10:57 am UTC
TheSHEEEP Jul 16, 2019
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Interesting, will add to my wishlist.
iiari Jul 16, 2019
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Purchased!
no_information_here Jul 16, 2019
Looks good. Thanks for the heads-up.

Any comments from the other tower-defence addicts around here?
Thetargos Jul 17, 2019
Purchased, looks fun and interesting.

Edit:

It actually is very fun to play (challenging, even).

Reminds me a lot of the Dungeon Defenders art style, and it also uses Unreal Engine.

I figured it was best of me editing this post rather than posting again.


Last edited by Thetargos on 17 July 2019 at 3:28 am UTC
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