The tower itself.
The Perfect Tower is a video game created by Fire Sword Studios for computers made in Unity in 2016. It's a mashup of two genres: Idle Game and Tower Defense. You control and upgrade a tower which shoots at enemy cubes. While simplistic at first, the game quickly opens up many interesting mechanics to help the player, such as a factory to produce resources, a workshop that modifies the tower's starting upgrades, a laboratory that unlocks permanent research upgrades, headquarters that unlock special ultimate upgrades for the tower, and the temple that has immensely powerful end-game stuff.
The game is available on Kongregate here
. A sequel called The Perfect Tower II is available as Early Access on Steam and will also be playable on mobile devices.
This game provides examples of:
- Absurdly High Level Cap: The level cap on certain upgrades can reach 100000, and if you max yourself out, most enemies of a same tier won't even be able to scratch you. But once the enemy's level gets high enough and their damage and health go over the numerical Cap (about 1.8*10^308)... they tier up, and if their tier is higher than yours, they don't take any damage from your tower AND they One-Hit Kill you. To counter this, you need to tier up your own tower, and in order to do so you need to max out all your tower's upgrades. Doing this resets your upgrades, which also means you need to buy all the massively leveled upgrades all over again to get to the next tier and so on, making this game a huge example of a ludicrously high level cap. The highest blueprint tier is 2 billion, in case you were wondering.
- Ad Reward: There's an option to watch a video for 50 gems and a temporary 2x orange resource gain, but it no longer seems to work.
- Airborne Mook: Air-element enemies hover over the ground, attacking your tower with ranged shots.
- All Your Colors Combined: If the graphics quality is set to medium or high, each element makes the bullets shot by the tower a different color when it's triggered, while multiple elements give them their colors simultaneously. Once you've maxed out all elemental chances, the tower continuously unleashes a CPU/GPU-intensive multicolored barrage.
- An Ice Person: The Ice element. For the tower, it makes its shots slow down enemies; for the enemies, it makes them split in two when they die.
- Attack Reflector: The Reflect upgrade. It allows the tower to reflect enemy damage back at them. The Universal enemies also occasionally reflect damage.
- Blow You Away: The Air element. For the tower, it makes its shots push enemies away; for the enemies, it makes them always ranged and gives them flight.
- Casting a Shadow: The Darkness element. For the tower, it makes its shots deal percentage-based damage; for the enemies, it makes them invisible until they're 9 m from the tower.
- Character Customization: There's an option to customize the tower that costs 2 rare gems. It allows you to change its color and put assets on it.
- Chromatic Arrangement: The three upgrade types have primary colors: Offensive is red, Defensive is blue, and Utility is yellow.
- Contractual Boss Immunity: Bosses are immune to several useful effects like insta-kill abilities, slowdown and knockback.
- Dishing Out Dirt: The Earth element. For the tower, it make its shots stun enemies; for the enemies, it makes them absorb damage occasionally.
- Elemental Powers: The tower has eight different ones: Fire, Ice, Earth, Air, Electricity, Darkness, Nature and Gravity. The enemies also have elemental properties which give them immunity to their counterparts and special traits in Insane Mode, though Gravity is replaced with Universal.
- Export Save: The game starts with 4KB save files which grow larger as you play (clearing just one mission can typically add 10 bytes). Due to engine limitations, a password is directly exported into a .txt file, but it can be copied into an import menu's window.
- Glass Cannon: A build that works on Easy, Normal and usually Hard is maxing many Offense and Utility upgrades, generally ignoring Defense. It doesn't work on Insane due to Universal enemies reflecting attacks back at the tower.
- Green Thumb: The Nature element. For the tower, it makes its shots deal percentage-based damage (not as strong as Darkness') and add it to its HP; for the enemies, it makes them grow stronger and regenerate health.
- Harder Than Hard: Insane Mode, unlocked after reaching Tier 1, is a large step up from Hard Mode. Not only do the enemies have way higher stats, they also get elemental properties to make them much trickier. It forces using upgrades which nobody would even try on easier difficulties. On the plus side, once it stops being a problem, it becomes the best mode for grinding.
- Infinity +1 Element: The Universal enemies. They are immune to all elements without Elemental Piercing and can reflect shots back at your tower.
- Infinity +1 Sword: The Ultimate upgrades. Unlocking them takes time and buying them is expensive, but stuff like insta-killing enemies who get shot or touch your tower, making enemies lose their elements or allowing you to reach far farther waves by weaking enemies is incredibly useful.
- Konami Code: Inputting the code on the title screen adds a flame effect to its background.
- Law of Chromatic Superiority: Universal enemies are the most dangerous elemental type and are black in color.
- Master of All: The tower, after getting enough upgrades. It will not only fire tens of shots per second with incredibly high damage, but it will also be nearly indestructible and have properties of all the elements.
- Minimalism: The title screen describes the game as "A somewhat minimalistic incremental defense game." Indeed, while the gameplay is quite robust and packed with features, the graphics are generally minimilastic since everything is some kind of simple polytope.
- New Game Plus: Raising the Headquarter tiers removes your blueprint and farthest wave for some purple resources and new features, making you start again but with more content. Town tiers trump HQ tiers though, since they remove everything except for purchased rare gems and town credits you get from them. You need to start completely fresh except for those new upgrades. You could consider it a New Game+^2.
- Non-Elemental: Normal enemies don't have any immunities or specialties. You can turn elemantal enemies normal by using purification skills.
- No Plot? No Problem!: There's no plot, just shooting at cubes. You do get a cutscene after a while, but even it doesn't add much to the story department.
- No-Sell:
- Earth-elemental enemies have a chance of ignoring damage outright.
- When your tower's tier is higher than the enemies' it will take zero damage from them no matter how strong they are. Likewise, the reverse is true, and enemies whose tier is higher than your tower's will ignore all harm from it.
- Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: Achievements raise the amount of orange resources you gain by 1%. You can put a black resource to an achievement to raise that to 2%, and if there's five in a row, 4%.
- One-Hit Kill:
- Some upgrades cause this. Serious Missile instantly kills enemies with shots, while Vaporize instantly kills enemies who touch your tower.
- If the enemy has a lower tier than your tower, they are unable to do any damage to it and will die instantly from any shots. The same happens to your tower if it's the enemies that have a higher tier.
- Playing with Fire: The Fire element. For the tower, it makes its shots deal amplified damage; for the enemies, it makes them explode when they touch your tower.
- Power Glows: The tower has a blue glow flow above it if Rapid Fire has been triggered.
- Regenerating Health: The tower can have up to 1000%/sec regeneration. The Nature enemies also regenerate.
- Shock and Awe: The Electricity element. For the tower, it makes its shots deal splash damage; for the enemies, it makes them warp around the battlefield.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: Fighting Cubos throws away most of the game's standard tower defense mechanics, instead using your prestige resources to upgrade your tower with entirely different upgrades from the norm.
