12 Games of Christmas: Stop Santa – Tower Defense (PC)

The tower defense genre is one of the easier game formats to design a decent game for. All you need are a few different towers to defend the lanes, some enemies to run by them and get shot, and a few map designs and you’ve got a simple yet functional game that can still have layers of strategy to play. Tweaking difficulty is only as hard as making sure some arrangement of towers can hold back the tides of marching foes, but making an enjoyable tower defense game requires more finesse and complexity than simply constructing a working product. Stop Santa – Tower Defense is an example of what a tower defense game with little thought or imagination can be while still being structurally sound, the game hitting the most basic beats but not trying at all to evolve beyond them.

Almost immediately the player will realize how empty and cheaply made Stop Santa – Tower Defense is. There is no tutorial to explain any of the game elements, the player having to figure out how to play on their own, and in a game that was otherwise easy enough to potentially be baby’s first tower defense, the absence of any explanation of what’s going on prevents it from being novice friendly. With only a vague story description on the Steam page to even set up its conflict, Stop Santa – Tower Defense spends absolutely no time establishing itself. What appears to be happening though is that Santa’s elves at the North Pole have turned into zombies, even Santa himself seemingly succumbing to this undead plague. They are very much cartoon zombies so even the elf girl with a missing eye still manages to be cute instead of gruesome, and if one thing can be said about Stop Santa – Tower Defense, it’s that it didn’t phone in the visuals. The colorful winter world and the shambling elves look good, even if it is a somewhat generic holiday look with only the small twist of the zombie designs.

For the gameplay, people familiar with the genre will pick up on how to play easily enough as the design of this tower defense is bog standard. Each of the nine short levels on offer contain open lanes the zombies will slowly walk through, various entrances and paths existing for them to take. The exit, as indicated by the two Christmas trees on either side of the path, is what you need to protect, any elf that gets through taking away some of your health for the level. The player must construct towers beside the lanes to automatically fire on nearby elves and kill them before they reach this exit, the player given a score out of five stars based on how little damage they took in the stage. You only have a few spots you can build your towers though, these marked by candy canes surrounded by a circle of ice. You get a small chunk of change to start a level with to spend on towers, earning more coins whenever an enemy is killed by a tower and earning more based on the strength of the dead zombie. However, the game again restricts info from the player here, as when they click on the candy cane for the first time, they see three essentially meaningless symbols. There is no description available for what the three tower options can do, the player having to place them and learn their function that way.

There are only three towers in the entire game as well, and none of them have particularly interesting functions. The basic laser snowman fires the fastest but is the weakest, the peppermint spitting candy tower is of moderate strength and fires at a moderate speed, and the reindeer themed tesla coils fire thunderbolts that deal heavy damage but do so slowly. You can at least see names and stats for them if you click on them after they are placed, although the stat numbers really aren’t too helpful compared to just seeing them in action. There are no special traits to these towers or their shots, meaning all calculations about tower placement pertain almost purely to raw damage output. The cost of them at least doesn’t make this completely mindless, but even this has a small issue. The basic laser snowman is 70 coins, but for the better peppermint tower, it’s only 10 coins more, with even the most basic elf giving about 3 coins on kill and coming in such numbers that you at most have to wait a second to have this better tower option available. The reindeer lightning rod is at least pricier than both and slower so it can’t be justified as easily as just waiting a second for to be available like a peppermint tower, but because of the pricing problems and little variance between towers, strategy isn’t too important in Stop Santa – Tower Defense. In the early part of a level you will need to manage money better until you can build up cash quickly, but soon it becomes about setting down peppermint towers and upgrading them when you can, paying money for more power in yet another way that doesn’t require careful consideration.

The enemy variation, perhaps unsurprisingly, is just a matter of scaling. The weakest enemies come in the greatest numbers and are easiest to kill, but new elf types are introduced with more health so they’re a bit more durable. You only get to the real tough enemies when the penguins start appearing, these little guys soaking up damage and at least testing to make sure you have been building the best towers you can, and when Santa himself shows up, he’s practically the closest thing to a boss this game has as he does actually require you to have a pretty optimal tower setup. As said though, optimal tower setup is pretty much just upgraded peppermint towers all over the place, but the path to getting there can at least be a little tense thanks to midtier enemies like the penguins and the surges of weak enemies that might overwhelm slow or weak towers. Stop Santa – Tower Defense does nail that baseline difficulty curve and the core appeal of a tower defense game with how it paces enemy waves, but any potential for strategy is incredibly limited and even encounters a few hiccups with hit detection. On top of not being told what your tower is before placing it, you don’t really get a good idea of its range, and some towers seem to have variable ranges for no good reason. You might spot two adjacent enemies enter what seems like your tower’s line of sight, see one get zapped, but then your tower lets the other pass. In levels with lines that wind around, sometimes a tower might not fire on enemies in certain lanes if it decided to focus on another, the way the towers pick enemies in a pack sometimes strangely random as well.

Lack of reliable enemy targeting can screw up an otherwise decent tower placement, but it’s not too difficult to ace levels without losing a single bit of life. In fact, most of the difficulty only comes in the start of a level when you have limited resources and don’t know what to expect yet, and most failures will probably come when the game introduces its new enemies that show you how dependent on the midrange power/speed mix of the peppermint tower you’re likely to become. This ends up making Stop Santa – Tower Defense a game that isn’t too easy or overwhelmingly difficult, a tiny bit of thought needed to win but not the kind of interesting planning that could elevate it from passively dull into something more engaging or strategic.

THE VERDICT: For all the things done poorly in Stop Santa – Tower Defense, it also shows that the tower defense genre has an inherent strength when its raw ingredients are at least decently balanced. You need to build and upgrade your towers in a way that keeps pace with your cash income from killing zombie elves, tougher enemies existing to ensure you’re at least balancing your layout well. The problem is, everything is just about the most basic of strategies, none of the towers or enemies packing any unique variables or behaviors. It’s all about the raw strength of what you can build versus the numbers and health bar sizes of incoming enemies. There is nothing wrong with the level designs or even these concepts if they were the basis of something that would later introduce greater complexity and variety, but these fundamentals are all Stop Santa – Tower Defense has across its nine levels, and it doesn’t bother to try and be anything more than them.

And so, I give Stop Santa – Tower Defense for PC…

A BAD rating. Stop Santa – Tower Defense feels like someone started making a tower defense video game and never finished. It won’t even take two hours to beat the nine levels, but while this would be a decent time to roll out new features, nothing of note is really added before the game comes to an end. There should have been some point where a truly different element is introduced that forces you out of the comfort zone of just placing down the most efficient tower as often as possible. Your only influence on your enemies is killing them and their only strategy is marching forward, so Stop Santa – Tower Defense is only as interesting as most tower defense games’ tutorials. Of course, this game doesn’t even have a tutorial for its small amount of mechanics while also having little issues with determining where a tower might be able to shoot and which enemy it will target when it does so. Christmas music and colorful visuals may be able to sustain a children’s Christmas special, but applying the same to a generic tower defense that goes nowhere makes for a game that feels incredibly empty and unlikely to inspire any Christmas cheer.

Stop Santa- Tower Defense is developer Taco Truck Games’s first title and one created specifically to be a short game that can be turned out quickly, but the attempt to make it fun was a failure. It hits the basics you need for a potentially enjoyable tower defense but includes none of the important additions that can shake up gameplay or inspire interesting considerations about tower placement. With nothing exceptional to latch onto, the little issues in tower balancing and missing information instead stand out, meaning you’ll likely want to stop playing Stop Santa – Tower Defense before you hit the very early end.