Arbitrary build paths muddle the gameplay a bit.
"Ambitious" is a good word to describe Elite Forces: Conquest. It's a hybrid of turret defense and tower defense, with a slight twist: your hero character aims and shoots on his own. This takes aiming out of the equation, but still allows you to target individual mobs who slipped past the towers.
There are several characters to choose from, an arsenal of man-portable weapons, and a nice skill tree for character advancement. Despite all those features, however, the main character doesn't have much impact on gameplay.
You'll mostly end up moving him to a good ambush spot and leaving him there as a turret. Every once in a while, you might suicide-bomb a cluster of enemies, but for the most part, there's very little your hero can do if you don't play the turret game well.
It takes longer than usual to figure out which turrets are useful in which situations, mostly because each upgrade of each tower has different, almost random stats. You'll put a long-range turret in between two paths and upgrade it, only to discover that the range shrinks and it's suddenly a point-defense turret. Rapid-fire turrets suddenly become one-hit wonders that take ages to reload. This robs the player of agency and makes tactical gameplay almost impossible.
A good game is easy to learn but challenging to master. This game is just difficult to understand. Badim, if you're reading this, the sheer amount of cool stuff you've packed into this game is awesome, but you need to arrange it more carefully to create a cohesive whole. The player needs to understand which upgrades are good and which upgrades are a waste of time BEFORE he buys them. Here are my suggestions on how to better balance the game:
- An upgrade should only ever INCREASE one or more of the attributes. (Range should NEVER shrink. An upgrade should NEVER be slower than the previous model.)
- Each gun should have a general theme, and stick with that theme across all the upgrades. (For example, one type of gun starts off long-range, and continually gets longer. One gun starts out short-range but with splash, and this keeps increasing.)
- If you want specialized guns for specific roles, that's fine, but make them OPTIONAL alternative build paths. (For example, the fire tower could be short range and splash, but with an alternate branch that increases range more than power.)
- When balancing the guns, consider dammage-per-second. Also consider how many enemies are likely to overlap at once, when deciding how important Splash is. (You could run some test cases in Flash. For instance, run 100 of each type of enemy past each turret and have an extra meter that totals up the dammage.)
- I like the fact that some turrets increase the hero's stats and other towers' stats, but I feel like this aspect is over-emphasized. (The only way I could succeed in the later levels was to build an obscene ammount of stat-boosting towers. The game slowed down because I had like 100 towers, but I was able to kill 100% of enemies with machinegun and frost aura.)
In general, you have a lot of great ideas here, but they don't combine well to make up a cohesive whole. You need to give the player a sense of "agency"-- a feeling that he is in control over his own fate. Part of that means making sure he can understand what he's doing before he does it. Otherwise it's just lots of failure and experimentation until he stumbles across the one uber tower combination.
Your game is difficult, but it is not challengeing. A challenging game gives the player just enough knowlege and resources that he knows what he has to do and a little bit of how to pull it off, and he will learn more as he practices. A difficult game just kicks you in the balls over and over again until you stumble across the most optimal playstyle. Challenging games are fun. Difficult games are just frustrating.
I do admire the ambition that went into this. It just needs balancing, and a little bit more structure.