Tower defense games are always satisfying. There’s something great about watching wave after wave of bad guys shatter or explode. So when I saw Impious Pumpkins last month, I got pretty excited for a game with tower defense principles, but didn’t restrict your “towers” to certain lanes. This month I was fortunate enough to get my hands on an early copy of the game, and throughly enjoyed smashing pumpkins!
The concept of the game is simple: some asshole pumpkins are coming to your ghastly house to wreck it, and you and your army of ghosts have to stop them. You’ve got 4 classes of battle ghosts to choose from, each costing energy to place. All of this so far is pretty standard tower defense fun. What makes Impious Pumpkins more interesting is that your towers don’t stay in one place- your little ghosts will move to engage nearby pumpkins, which makes them more like infantry than little towers. But your pumpkin foes also come in a few mobile flavors, so the battle gets pretty wild pretty quick.
Once the fighting starts, each battle can get pretty intense. Along with watching the pumpkins popping up on the map and dropping your ghosts to meet them, you also have to click individual energy orbs to refill your coffers. This makes for a lot of clicking and very little time to rest. In fact, taking your eye off the game for a second can lead to your very expensive healers getting dead. It definitely give the game a bit of an RTS vibe.
The first few levels seemed pretty easy, but I definitely got my ass kicked the first time I encountered a poison mage pumpkin, which single-handedly wiped out half of my force. These bastards can range attack your dudes, have a ton of health, are protected by a field that hits any melee, and can spit poison. What sort of unholy mixture is all that?! And it possibly gets worse with the fire mages… It seems the order in which enemies appear, and which varieties appear, is mostly random, so getting crushed once doesn’t mean you’re doomed the next time. As the levels progress, the number of pumpkins that appear increases and it seems the number of mages does too.
There isn’t a ton of variety to the game, which might be it’s only negative. While the maps change every three levels, and each map is a little different, the game is still effectively the same. There’s no new units for you to use, and it seems there’s not that many enemy unit varieties. However, it can also be argued the simplicity is also part of the charm of the game- the few unit types make it harder to overthink each placement. Aside from a gripe with dropping units when I mean to click on an energy orb, that my only beef. It’s all pretty well done!
Overall, Impious Pumpkins is a fun little game. If you like tower defense, or just simple strategy and combat games, it’s definitely for you. Check it out here on Steam!
4 chirps out of 5.