101 on how not to release your game

<*>Develop a game and make one of its main features a ranking list. <*>Give people early access to the full game (Note: you couldn't buy EA). <*>Release the game and don't reset ranking/progress. <*>Congratulation. One of your features is now scewed and completly irrelevant.

Just not it. Very difficult even on easiest difficulty. Needs more balancing honestly

I did like this game... then it kinda gets boring. The same looking map over and over and over. Having to build the same bloody infastructiure every time around. And then it feels like the late Meta progresssion is utterly pointless. Yes I get to save up 1000 Honour and then later 2000 honour to have a chance 1% and then 2% chance at better rewards? Ohh I get to spend honour so I get better rewards from a Chest? But then a Elite enemy must actually spawn. I'm at a point where I realize my strats are not good enough as a go Fine... Fine ... Fine... Dead. And Meta progression has stopped being interesting. And because I have to rebuild my town from the ground up, their never really seems to be resources available to even look at some of the more expensive buildings. And I kinda hate RNG.... Ohh I get an Oracle event that lets me research things faster early in the map? Only problem is the University requires so much wood. That the effect will be long gone before I ever get the University built. And then I will probably die next wave anyway cause my towers failed to deal 1 more damage to the first boss, and he leaks and its game over. Don't matter how weak he is, or how strong my defese still are. It doesn't matter that I have beaten him 10 times in row with the same strategy, my towers did not get the correct RNG buff, a RNG buff actually made the towers I relied on worthless. Some tower feel utterly worthless. The Cold Tower being one of them, its suppose to Damage and Slow? Does it do anything? OR Is it dropped their speed from a whole 10 to a 9.5? I can visually tell. And its damage output is lacking. And Ohh Goodey, I finally got enough Banners for a Fusion Banner? But wait.... I have to go look on a Wiki that the towers I like to use don't have a Fusion available. And when I do find a combo to aim for, their is very little visual indication that anything different or more powerful is happening.

I’ll keep this short. I bought Nordhold for its promise as a tower defense game that offers a fresh experience every run, thanks to its procedurally generated maps and banner system—a nod to mechanics found in games like Hades. The added Roguelite elements were meant to boost replayability as well. None of these elements is implemented badly, however, compared to Hades - where repeated challenges reward skill improvement and gradually unveil more of its story - Nordhold falls short in two key areas: player skill and power creep. First, regarding skill, traditional tower defense games are fun because you can replay the same map to refine your strategies and beat your previous records. In contrast, Nordhold’s random map generation limits your influence to merely placing and managing towers, and the inability to simply retry the same layout means you don't really get the chance to do tat, while the fact that it is a tower defense game simply lowers the skill ceiling immensely. The second issue is power creep. The game starts slowly, allowing you one or two towers per round. Yet, as you progress, both the number of enemies and available towers surge dramatically. By the time you hit endless mode, you’re managing dozens of towers against overwhelming hordes, resulting in chaotic visuals that feel unrewarding and even nauseating. While some may argue that the endless mode isn’t the main focus, I’ve beaten the game three times and unlocked over 80% of its achievements in just 14 hours. Once you complete the base game, the map doesn't expand any further and wave composition stays the same in every playthrough, so further grinding quickly loses its appeal. I expected at least double or triple the playtime to price ratio of any game I buy, in Nordhold, currently a 20€ title, it feels like I’m getting only about one hour of gameplay per Euro.

Very misleading description and trailer. This game has no city building and has an incredibly uninspired basic economy balance even for a tower defence game. Lacking depth, content and balance is incredibly shameful for a rogue-lite session-based tower-defense game: - Every run feels exactly the same thanks to lacking enemy variety and low amount of content overall - no regions, no player choice, no interesting challenges or "easter eggs". - Your build and synergies are mostly decided by RNG rolls for upgrades, and not by your "idea" or "plan" to cook up some interesting combo or interaction. Even then they feel basic aside from a few rare *unique* upgrades that are a half-step above the usual DPS increase. - Over-reliance on meta unlocks to pan out play time. Basically a lot of mechanics and upgrades are barred behind meta currency that is almost directly tied to time spent in-game. You cant expect to finish runs without clocking up currency to allow you to become powerful enough to beat scaled up waves even if your build is onpoint and your theorycrafting checks out. - No city building, no city planning. Its just an upgrade tree in the form of a few different buildings that boost your resource gain for building or upgrading towers. Another thing worth mentioning is that it uses free low poly asset packs that are sometimes incredibly clashing, ruining any semblance of an art style, hero portraits especially. Overall, cant recommend it.

Seemed to be the exact same thing as the demo. Wait for a deep discount

Unfortunately I can't recommend this in a current state. I'm in love with tower defence and rogue likes, but it feels that Nordhold just doesn't get it right. Meta progress doesn't stack your power, it's basically just core features walled behind the "too long tutorial" (8h spend didnt unlock all the core features still). Tower defence part is fine until you realise there is actually not that much variations that actually work (especially on higher ascendance), and base/eco building is basically spamming the same order in every game because starting bonuses doesn't affect that at all (maybe a little, but still same order). Upd. I just saw that they giving out the code for 3500 meta resource for early players which. This would save me like 3-4 hours of my life but unfortunately now I'm stuck looking at this banner in main menu giving me FOMO with no way to get that. Nice feature. For the devs: please take a closer look at eco roguelikes like Against the Storm and how they implement meta progresstion. You actually getting more powerful little by little after each upgrade, giving you a great sense of grows

Never understood the allure of locking game features behind lock and key, forcing the player to lose over and over again before they can actually experience the game it's meant to be played. It basically means, your first playthroughs are useless, and just a waste of time because you can't "beat the game" or even play it properly yet.

Okay this was too much fun. Bought the game, looked up, and it was 3 AM.

It seemed neat until I saw the perk that increases legendary discovery chance caps out at 2%. Also how low everything seems to cap out at and scale too. Really? Seriously? THATS the cap of a stat like that in your roguelike? No thanks, hard pass.

Super fun in the beginning, but has a serious shelf life. You basically have to memorize a upgrade pattern, then pray you get a layout that works. Incredibly stupid past level 37. I don't get why ruin a game at the very end?

I want to have FUN playing a game, without watching play-throughs, or reading comments (which I never do), and this experience has been *nothing* like FUN. At first (the demo), it was great! Awesome graphics, interesting mechanics, etc. I put it on my wishlist. I not only bought it, I also bought the 'Supporter' pack, thinking (wrongly) that the developers would actually listen to the negative comments that might get posted by players like me. I can't even kill the level 10 BOSS anymore regularly. I'm done, after 22+ hours, over MANY months of playing here-and-there; it aint gettin any better....

Practically impossible to get past the first 10 waves. overly complex mechanics for a TD game and a worthless tutorial... good luck

Game is just amazing even in its 1.0 release form, i got so hooked i almost lost my job, my girlfriend, my dog was always hungry, didnt pick up my kids at school, didnt sleep, didnt take a shit. Thats how much i enjoyed it haha. The developers are still working on it so im eager to see the new towers and systems they come up with. Big shout out to splattercat for showcasing it on his channel. 100% would reccomend to a friend

Played 40 hours over the course of 2 days - didn't eat well, got dehydrated and ended up constipated. Would do it again. A+++

It's well made but I found it too redundant and already own like 10 tower defense games, I just don't need this. If you're a tower defense fanatic it's good. I see reviews that say it's different every run but I didn't see that. You can force the game to do things like make everything crit or faster attack speed/items to spice things up but nothing feels organic. It all feels contrived, I didnt really slip into cool builds I pretty much did the same thing every run unless I really went out of my way to do different things.

Sorry - can't review. Playing... :)

Too much like Rogue Tower, doesn't do enough different from that game Too little content for the price tag

Not Worth 15$, its worth 5$

Best TD game ever made, besides ur mom.

This game offers a lot of variability, but the optimization after wave 25 is poor. I regret buying it after realizing it’s published by a Russian company. Considering Russia's history of aggression and the ongoing war, I can't support a game that could potentially fund such actions. Be aware that part of your purchase may support the russian army of orcs, and there's a risk regarding your personal data being shared to FSB. I strongly advise against buying this game

This is not the best tower defense game you will ever play. However, it is doing some things that make it worth considering. There are things I like about this game and some things I really do not like. Weigh them for yourself and make your own judgment call. Meta Progress A lot of people like this feature - but 90% of the meta progression in this game is straight power creep or options that you really need if you want to build a successful run. I really dislike games that gate your ability to beat the game behind meta progression and this game commits that sin in pretty egregious ways. You would do well to beat the first boss in this game without meta progression, much less see the game through all the waves. For me, that is a really frustrating experience and for others, it is a feature. Judge for yourself. Tower Diversity There are only 8 towers, which is fine. Their upgrade options by leveling are pretty generic. The game turns itself into a roguelike through the "Banner" system and "Relic" system that supports it. The relic system is what you would expect from any roguelike and the system is just average. Not terrible, but not exceptional either. The banners are where the game is supposed to really open up and there are some interesting ideas here. Certain towers can get upgrades/synergies if you get the correct banner combinations together encouraging you to experiment with towers that work together. This is probably the only space in the game that encourages replayability and while the system is interesting, it was not compelling enough to carry the whole game for me. Replayability The game has no variation whatsoever in the enemy compositions. The map will expand and change in a procedurally generated fashion, but that doesn't change too much about how you are going to attack the game. You know you have to meet a certain DPS gate for each wave, and that DPS gate isn't going to change because the units pushing you never change from run to run. All replayability is pushed on the shoulders of the banner and relic system - and while those systems are fine or even good, they can't carry the entire game. Conclusion So - if you've read this far it seems pretty strange that I am still recommending this game. This is not the best tower defense game ever built, but it doesn't have to be. For the price point, the game is fair and it is appealing to people that have different tastes than me. That is fine and I think it is a really high quality mobile game sitting on PC and serving a group that enjoys these kind of systems. I'll probably come back and pick at this one every now and then, but it definitely is a "meh" for my personal tastes.

I've played custom games in Warcraft 3 that have more depth than this. The picture of the town you see in screenshots is all the "building" the game has to offer, mobile-tier gameplay. Positive reviews don't seem to be genuine, nearly all of them put out a review at 1 - 2 hours review time, and only then clocking in few hours. Rather than the opposite of clocking in the hours and then reviewing the game. The price is asking too much considering there are more complex games for much smaller price.

Played and loved the demo of this game. To my surprise I got an alert that the Devs had responded to my review of said demo. Which turned out to be a notification of the game's release. So basically they had me remind myself how much I enjoyed the demo by bringing me to my own review and then dangled the full release in front of my face at the same time. Like "Remember how much fun you had? Come on, you know you want it." - As if I'm that easy. So anyway, I bought the game and have already spent 8 hours playing it. Well played Devs, well played.

I got a raven to oneshot the first boss, then i died cause raven be slow. 10/10 would use mean stare ravens again