My Tower, My Home: A Leaning Tower of Disappointment

My Tower, My Home is a third person tower defense game developed by Shoor Games, that mixes a distinctive paper cut-out art style with quick shoot-em-up tower defense gameplay.

Its graphical design is solid overall, because it uses a quaint minimalistic approach to keep the action going, never once suffering from FPS issues or things like that.  The designs of the enemies are interesting, ranging from spider-like creatures with lasers on their backs to hover drones.  

It’s simple, varied, and yet boring

Image Credited to Humble Bundle Store

The game’s premise is pretty simple: survive waves upon waves of enemies trying to overtake your tower (which is also your home, hence the title) wash, rinse repeat.  Now, under normal circumstances this would be a recipe for a fairly simple game that’s little more than a time waster, but somehow My Tower, My Home ends up as a rather crude execution of the tower defense genre.

The game is varied, yes — it has all sorts of ways your little silhouetted man can protect your tower from the waves upon waves of enemies that it faces, ranging from turrets, to mines, to shotguns, walls, and other things like that. But while it has a very large quantity of things to do and ways to do them, it just falls flat.

Now, if you’re going by variety of ways to play, with that being all you need in a game in order for you to like it, then you’ll probably find no issue with My Tower, My Home, and will go about your time building interesting little ways to defend the tower. But, the issue lies with the fact that in-game, there’s really not much of an impact with the things that you do, there’s no real sense of progression to it.

There’s no sense of real progression

Image Credited to Humble Bundle Store

There’s a leveling system, yes, but every change you get is so minute it just doesn’t matter in the end. The player can essentially build a system where they can simply destroy everything without any real threat. Sure, most tower defense games let the player do this, since the object of the game is to defend the tower. However, the difference is that there’s still a challenge to it, because the enemies will gradually get harder for you to deal with. There are parts of My Tower, My Home that say that the enemies are getting stronger, but don’t convey that they are because if you’ve built a decent murder system, you’ll never see them.

Most of these things build up to just a mediocre tower defense game, but unfortunately there’s one big glaring issue that stares you dead in the eyes while fighting it — and that’d be the fact that My Tower, My Home has a terrible control scheme, controller or mouse.

Good luck wrestling with the controls

Image Credited to Humble Bundle Store

At times, you’ll be trying to put a defense down, but you’ll find that you can’t. There’s a delay before your actions actually happen, and you’ll find that, while playing, the controls will be flat out unresponsive. It ends up being far more beneficial to just run around and shoot the enemies rather that flailing about the “defenses” selection circle, trying to get it to respond.  There will be times where the tower will fall under no fault of your own, but because the controls weren’t working. 

Even better is when your bullets will go through the enemies, or when their bullets go through you, without either of you taking any damage. This game would have been just a simplistic tower defense game that was a little on the boring side, but with the way the controls and the hit detection works, it also has a level of “false difficulty” to it that makes it just a frustrating bore to play.  

My Tower, My Home is a mess of half-finished ideas that’s not fully realized by any stretch of the imagination. If you’re looking for a tower defense game, just give this one a pass.