Tower defense games were everywhere in the early days of mobile gaming. I can understand why they fell out of favor. Once you've seen a few of them, there's not much else to see. I don't remember anyone doing something dramatically different with the genre, and I stopped paying attention to it.
I think I should have kept up with it, because I just downloaded arknights and it's doing something extremely fresh. Instead of placing generic units on the field, you build a roster of 12 unique heroes before each map. There's eight different classes, and each character has a skill or talent that differentiates them from others in their class. Team composition is crucial to success on the maps, but there's a fair amount of flexibility in how you approach them. You can upgrade your characters' skills and levels between missions with materials that drop from the maps. There's a base-building part that's more or less ripped from X-COM that adds another strategic layer to the whole thing.
You can get new heroes through completing the story, over time by using a special recruitment mechanic, or with gacha rolls. Even here, they've done something interesting by making even low-rarity heroes viable into the late game. Even the starter units have skills that make them useful for much longer than you would expect.
It's made me fall in love with tower defense again, and it made me wonder what other games have done something different with the formula. What have I missed in the years that I wasn't interested in it? Can you recommend anything to me?
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