This is game is a new take on the tower defense genre of strategy games. You create a totem pole, which serves as a vertical tower that mustThis is game is a new take on the tower defense genre of strategy games. You create a totem pole, which serves as a vertical tower that must be defended from "evil spirits." The spirits descend from the top of the screen, to the left and right of your totem, and attack near its base.
The game's art style is inspired by Native American culture, which gives it excellent visual appeal that stands out from other games on the Nintendo eShop. Unfortunately, the music did not take a similar cue, and quickly becomes repetitive. There is little variety in the music, which is more like one tune that progresses depending on how well you're doing (or if you pause the game by pressing Y, not Start) than a fully-featured soundtrack.
Another issue with the art style of the game is the way that the Wii U's two screens are used. The TV shows your tower on the right-hand side, and available totem-pole parts on the left. The totem parts are also projected on the Wii U's GamePad. This seems like a bad use of the TV's screen area, as the half of the screen showing the available parts is made redundant by the GamePad. Removing that (or reducing it to one of the corners, a status bar, etc.) would free up the TV to focus on the totem pole and the evil spirits.
There are two game modes offered. In Classic mode, you build a tower using a pool of resources called "supplies." Different heads for you totem pole cost a varying amount of resources, and offer stat boosts to health, rate of fire, and so forth. Heads can be equipped with beaks (which fire arrows at evil spirits) and wings (which boost the health of the totem pole and can adjust the fire rate of the beaks). The game works mostly the same in Frantic mode, except that instead of spending supplies, you choose one of four randomly-selected heads or beaks to add to your totem pole. This is meant to be a more fast-paced, arcade experience, but from my time with the game it turns out to be the more balanced and fun of the two modes.
Each head of the totem pole can be equipped with two objects (beak or wing). When you select one of these objects it is applied to the top-most head that has an open spot. So if you choose a left-facing wing and your top head already has a beak there, it will be added to the next-lowest head with an opening. If there are no openings, nothing happens (although this slows you down in Frantic mode, as the game will reshuffle the available totem pole parts whether what you chose worked or not).
There is no progression in the game--all of the totem pole parts are available at the start. There aren't new modes to unlock. It has online leaderboards, which is a nice touch, but the game feels quite light on content. The Miiverse community is a mixed bag, which seems to be the case with these sorts of games. The developer's website boasts that the game's difficulty scales with your totem pole's progression, but in practice this just meant that many more evil spirits appeared. When your totem pole is reduced to only a few heads, these vast numbers of evil spirits are still there, making recovery from an assault difficult in Frantic mode and nearly impossible in Classic mode.
There isn't much more to say about this tower defense game. Unless you really like tower defense games, Native American art, or competing on online leaderboards, Totem Topple has very little to offer.… Expand
