To tell you the truth, I have never been very interested in tower defense games and have always dismissed them as little more than mobile games. It’s a bit of a stretch, but a part of me felt they didn’t fit in with these shiny new generation video game consoles with their teraflops. Having previously played Moss on my Sony VR rig, I decided to give Towers and Powers for PlayStation VR2 a try. The two games have very little in common apart from being in a genre I usually avoid, but Moss opened my eyes to the power of virtual reality to take some genre and game clichés from “okay” to “great”. Towers and Powers left me feeling similarly impressed when it comes to tower defense games. I would even go so far as to argue that virtual reality is the ultimate way to enjoy tower defense games. What I’m trying to say is that Towers and Powers executes its simple premise brilliantly with surprising depth, making it one of my favorite PS VR2 games of the year.

The setup for Towers and Powers is simple: Mythical beasts have invaded the world’s islands, inhabited by all sorts of monsters, and you must fight them off. The creatures are drawn from Greek mythology, and I was surprised at how often and how slowly new creatures were added to the enemy list late in the game. Basic cannon fodder enemies include zombies and their variants, but there are also shamans that heal surrounding enemies, sorcerer-like creatures that summon more zombies, and giant anthropomorphic turtles that fling entire sections of towers across the map. In other words, the game does a great job of keeping the player on edge from start to finish. It seems like a no-brainer, but for such a simple game, the attention to detail, including enemy variety, makes Towers and Powers an immersive experience across 15 levels and roughly 10 hours. Defending the

tower (a replica of the Parthenon) is similar to most tower defense titles: you buy units and place them around the level to efficiently and effectively destroy your enemies before they reach your base. Virtual reality works wonders in Towers and Powers, but so does good design. Each tower can be one to three stories tall, and can be configured with any combination of individual units you see fit. For example, you could place three pawns (archers) in the tower, who are particularly quick to fire arrows. Or a tower with a Pawn, Viking or Engineer that not only has an increased rate of fire and deals heavy damage, but can also throw lightning bolts between three enemies. There are a ton of combinations you can use to thwart your opponent’s advance, and sometimes you’ll have to adapt on the fly, especially in the later stages.

Units are purchased with gold earned from killing monsters and placed on the map by grabbing them with one hand and pressing a trigger to drop them into specific building locations. Multiple units can be placed on top of each other, with the top unit representing each tower’s attack type and the units below adding passive bonuses. I found that each unit type has its time and place. Sometimes I needed the defense-lowering ability of a Monk’s explosive barrel so that a Viking’s axe-thrower could kill bad guys more easily from a greater distance, other times I needed the sheer attack speed of a triple-stacked Archer tower. There are so many strategies for each level that I doubt two players will be able to approach them in exactly the same way. In addition to their use in towers, units can also be placed on the map itself to act as melee units or obstacles for attackers. I can’t tell you how many times dropping a few Viking warriors outside of my base has saved me from a last-minute defeat.

It’s only in the later levels of standard difficulty that losing becomes a big deal. However, there is also an easy and even harder difficulty if you really want a challenge. Nonetheless, I found the challenge to be fair and balanced. Some levels contain big mini-boss enemies that will destroy your base in one hit if you leave them alone, but later levels increase the number of portals they spawn from and introduce more advanced enemy types, so you’ll probably end up repeating waves of one, two, or five. Not that I know anything about that.

When things get dangerous in the heat of battle, the “power” part of the equation becomes an issue. Magic balls fly across the screen frequently as gifts from the gods to help you in your time of need. You can grab these with both hands and throw them on the map to turn the situation in your favor. Orbs range from fireballs to slow freezes to healing auras for foot units. But the real blessings of the gods are your spells, which allow you to annihilate enemies and (literally) finish off strong waves of enemies singlehandedly. Spells can be cast by drawing various symbols with your right hand, which have a stronger power than a regular bullet. For example, drawing a circle on the screen will fire a volley of fireballs, or the movement of an hourglass will slow time to a minimum. Mana is restored over time and by the bursting of mana orbs flying across the sky, but I tried to save spells as a last resort – usually for the final wave or two of a level, where absolute chaos can reign. As the game progresses, more spells are added to your repertoire, but I couldn’t find any references or codex entries that explained how to cast each individual spell, other than by memorizing its pattern. This was a real shame, as it meant that I didn’t use several spells other than the three I remembered. Anyway, the spells I mastered got me out of many sticky situations.

In this regard, the game does a poor job of explaining the criteria for the star rating system, where you receive a certain number of stars for completing each level. Sometimes you got zero, sometimes 1, sometimes 2, sometimes 3, which seemed to be the maximum number. The ability to replay a level and get 3 stars is certainly a welcome feature to extend the game’s lifespan, but this needs more explanation. It is clear that the star rating is tied to the health of your base at the end of the level, but the respective thresholds are not explicitly explained. Completionists will find this oversight especially frustrating considering each of the 15 levels has up to eight waves to survive, and if you’re fumbling around in the dark trying to get to three stars, you’ll want to break your headset in half when you make it to the end and unknowingly miss out on the achievement.

Still, these are relatively minor issues in the grand scheme of what Towers and Powers has to offer. They can and hopefully will be fixed in a post-release patch. Even if that doesn’t happen, I can easily recommend this game to all PS VR2 owners. It’s easy to pick up, hard to put down, and enjoyable for long gaming sessions. Being in virtual reality has a transformative effect on the game, allowing you to interact with your units and levels in a tactile way that just isn’t possible when playing on a traditional screen. Just as Moss showed us that platform games are best played in VR, Towers and Powers shows us that tower defense games are best played in VR too. It was a metaphorical dart throw for me when I chose it as a game for review, but I can’t express how glad I am to have taken a chance on Towers and Powers, because it became one of my favorite experiences on PS Became VR2.

Towers and Powers is a great example of how virtual reality can improve certain genres. I’ve played tower defense games before, but I never knew that VR was the ultimate way to enjoy them. Towers and Powers has convinced me of this, so I can easily recommend this game on PS VR2.