• Won first round... no clue what I am doing
• This looks neat, upgrade
• Thing upgraded s*cks. Damnit.
• Starting to lose
• Brilliant idea... strength in numbers.
• Brilliant idea went to sh*t.
• Scratches head until bald.
• Starting to think size matters.
• Itched my eye until red
• Did not help having one eye... got smoked again
• Invested in some bigger gun research
• Can't afford to place the big guns. Crap!
• Have to angry pee... gonna hold it.
• Day 10... ummm... yay?
• Big Sky ship comes.. seriously??
• Crawls onto floor in fetal position in shame
• One good eye still watching monitor
• Holy f*ck that is a lot of troops.
• What was the goal again?

Would volunteer to play Taur® for eight hours again to be a digital pinata!

Bringing Out The Big Guns

Gameplay:

Positives:

• Great low poly art, with excellent animations and visual effects.
• The gameplay is a heap-ton of fun. You control the prime tower in the center of your construction which can use two out of eight weapons at a given time, you also get special abilities (such as slow time) to use. Then you have the building side of things, you have a hexagonal grid around your tower with some larger building slots on the periphery. Each slot has to be bought and then you buy towers. So, once you get going with the game, you have your towers chewing up enemies while you’re also shooting at them. It gets pretty intense once the game starts throwing a lot of enemies at you, and it’s an absolute blast.
• Tower variety is great. There’s a bunch of different things you can unlock including drones that use swords and shields, SAM sites, flying bombers, anti-projectile lasers etc.
• Not including the boss fight, there are four different mission types. Invasion, Siege, Skyfall and Air Raid (this is my personal favorite). Invasion sees you fight off waves of mostly infantry enemies. Siege sends in ‘siege’ enemies such as tanks and missile launchers. Skyfall randomly drops infantry enemies all over the map, making them harder to deal with than in Invasion. Air Raid has you defending against waves of air enemies such as fighter jets and bombers. They’re all a lot of fun.
• The research tree is pretty big, with three main branches. You have one branch dedicated to the prime weapons, one to towers and then one to a couple of miscellaneous things and your special abilities. There’s a lot to unlock, and I feel like everything is well-balanced. I never felt like anything on the tree was useless.
• Taur features a Forge where you can go to spend a small amount of currency on trying to improve your weapons. You can get pretty significant stat boosts from these, though sometimes your stats will get decreased (in these instances you can usually just reroll since it’s so cheap). It’s a nice little way to boost your prime tower that’s cheap and effective.
• Enemy variety is quite good, with several enemy types each for infantry, air and siege.
• The final boss is one tough customer. I don’t want to spoil anything about the fight, but I think it offers a pretty significant challenge. You get your first chance to fight the boss at Day 50 in the campaign, and then it re-appears every 25 days until you’re able to defeat it.
• The missions are short. Most of them will only take you a few minutes. This makes the game feel a little more fast-paced, and it also means that you can buy upgrades more often.
• Great sound-effects.

Negatives

• Taur’s biggest issue is that there’s just not enough variety in maps. The maps are all pre-made rather than procedurally generated, but there’s only somewhere in the region of ten-fifteen of them. It doesn’t take long for you to start seeing the same maps over and over again, it gets a bit stale. For the most part, they’re not particularly complex either. Many of the maps just have wide open spaces, with few that have interesting terrain details such as bottlenecks.
• There are seven currencies in the game, with the exception of Power which is used for almost everything, the other currencies are only used for specific things. For example, power cores are used when adding new buildings. Each mission can only give you two types of currency other than Power, and there were a few times where I’d need a specific currency, but I wouldn’t see it for 5+ missions. At times like this, having so many currencies creates frustration because you can’t get the upgrades you want/need.
• Another issue with currencies is that the rewards for missions seem to be randomly assigned, and they don’t seem to scale as you get further in the game (and things get more expensive). For instance, a mission with Extreme enemy resistance might pay less than a mission with Moderate enemy resistance. It would have made more sense to have the reward amount tied to how difficult the mission is.
• I don’t feel like there’s really enough content here to justify a $25 price tag. To me this seems more like a $15 game. The lack of map variety in particular really makes it feel like a smaller game than it could/should have been and after you've beaten the boss (should take around 5-10 hours) there are no other goals or gamemodes.

Verdict: