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Refactor’s new ideas reinvigorate tower defense - Pocket Playfest

4K View2023-06-07

Refactor

8.1

Tower DefenseStrategyRogueliteSingleplayerBuilding

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Tower defense has proven to be a surprisingly durable game format, but after getting swamped with them during their initial boom, I’ve needed a good gimmick to keep me interested for very long. Refactor is, on paper anyway, a standard tower defense game, but it adds enough new layers to make it feel like a wholly new kind of experience.

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Welcome to TapTap’s Pocket Playfest - An Indie Celebration! Beginning on June 16 and running through June 28, we will be showcasing demos for ten brand-new, unpublished mobile games. These ten games are all from indie developers and represent some of the most exciting upcoming mobile games on the horizon. You’ll only be able to download those demos for Android right here on TapTap, so stay tuned!

In addition to checking out some exciting new games, you’ll also be able to vote for your favorites. The developers whose games get the most votes will get a big cash prize from TapTap, and that’s not all: You can win too! Just by playing these games and voting for your favorites, you’ll earn points and get entered into a giveaway! You could win a Steam Deck, an Xbox Elite controller, or even a $1000 gift card.

Refactor is one of the ten games TapTap will be featuring as part of our Pocket Playfest. Enjoy the rest of our thoughts, and be sure to come back on June 16 so you can download it and try it for yourself. Play and vote for your chance to win!

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The tower defense basics remain untouched: Creeps spawn at an entrance and make their way to the level’s exit, and it’s the player’s job to prevent them from completing the trip by placing offensive towers along their route. I could place towers so that the creeps’ path became longer, and upgrade the towers I had placed by spending the currency I earned in previous rounds.

That’s just the starting point for Refactor, though. The tutorial guided me through its complex tower selection and upgrade systems, which transform it into more of a puzzle game than any tower defense game I’ve played before. Each time I wanted to place a new tower, I paid to draw a selection of three from my deck. Towers fire everything from standard bullets to homing rockets, and come in one of several elemental types.

Each tower also comes on a piece of terrain, which I could use to expand the playing field and lengthen creeps’ journey to the exit. By spending a lump sum, I could upgrade my deck, increasing my chances of drawing more powerful versions of each type of tower.

The real fun began when I got into combining towers, which is called “refactoring.” Along with the randomly drawn tower cards each turn, there were also a random set of refactor recipes available at any given time. If I had the correct three towers on the board, I could refactor them into a much more powerful tower—and then upgrade this by placing other refactor towers on top of it, combining them.

It’s a lot to take in, but in practice, Refactor feels almost breezily experimental and improvisational. I was always trying to make the best with what I had, rather than crafting intricate plans for which upgrade path I wanted to take. My only complaint is that the UI can sometimes be a bit fussy and difficult to intuit—there’s a lot of information available for each tower, and it’s presented as a long, boring list of numbers that could be frustrating to scan through as I played.

The clunky UI became less of a problem as I got used to the game, though, and there’s enough cool stuff to dig into with Refactor that I’m willing to look past its menus. It’s been a long time since a tower defense game has grabbed me hard enough to make me think about it while I’m not playing it, so this is one that’s pretty easy to recommend.