Rustic Defense is a tower defence game developed by Lasot Interactive and released on Steam on 24 November 2025. I hadn’t played a tower defence game with an isometric or top-down view for ages. I remember the period from 2008 to 2010, when the genre experienced significant growth, driven by games designed for online distribution using Adobe Flash Player. Free browser-based clones of Plants vs. Zombies were very popular at that time. I was an avid player of Stalingrad, a tower defence game where you have to defend the city of Stalingrad from the Nazi invasion.
Returning to the present, Rustic Defense adds roguelike elements to the tower defence genre, making it more challenging than ever. As if tower defence wasn’t challenging enough already!
The aim is to withstand a certain number of enemy waves without reducing the militia in our base to zero. What may seem easy to say is much harder to do. Indeed, Rustic Defense introduces elements that are uncommon in tower defence games, or at least in the ones I am familiar with. These include the fog of war, inflation of turret prices and a procedurally generated map — all of which greatly increase the level of challenge. If tower defence games can already be time-consuming traps for players, then Rustic Defense is a strong candidate for the best time-waster alongside tycoon games.
The selection of a chapter allows for the selection of the difficulty of each game. Each chapter has a maximum number of waves and a specific number of roads leading to the player’s base (from one, easy, to three, hard) as well as special conditions that modify the game’s difficulty, such as wizards blocking free squares at each wave or enemies that are much more powerful than normal.
As well as choosing a chapter, we can also select a hero: a character who will assist in defending the base when enemies evade the turrets.
Rustic Defense: Knock those goblins back!
In Rustic Defense, the map is covered by clouds and revealed little by little with each wave. As the map is revealed, we can see that the enemies’ paths differ from one game to the next, and there are multiple biomes, including valleys, mountains, swamps and deserts. The enemies change depending on the biome and become stronger as the game progresses.
Furthermore, we choose which paths to reveal first and which later, rather than the map being automatically revealed with each wave. Even though we must inevitably reveal the entire map to win the game, this enables us to concentrate on a particular path by placing more turrets there. However, be careful: the shorter the paths, the closer the enemies will appear to the base. Therefore, it is not advisable to keep routes short in the advanced stages of the game, as increasingly powerful enemies will appear with each wave, making us regret the initial hordes of goblins in the first few waves.
Defending our base is made more difficult by the increasing price of towers with each purchase. In fact, the price increases every time we place a turret, reaching about 15 times the initial price in the later stages of the game. This forces us to position the different types of turret carefully, use their capabilities to the fullest, level them up, and unlock upgrades in the main menu.
I told you it was a roguelike
The first few games of Rustic Defense are bound to end in failure. It’s pointless hoping to kill the Gobmammoth before it destroys our base, or expecting to withstand the hordes of fast lions emerging from the desert. If we don’t spend experience points to acquire new upgrade cards, our games are doomed to fail one way or another. There are also cards, but it’s not a deck-building game.
At the end of each game, we earn XP, which can be spent on purchasing upgrades or unlocking new structures. Upgrades are provided during the game in the form of cards that are unlocked after a certain number of waves, or by unlocking a specific upgrade after each wave. This means that you certainly can’t expect to have a mega-super-turret defending your base from the first wave, so you always have to focus on the game and build your defensive network wisely, without relying solely on brute force.
To unlock advanced weapons, which inflict elemental damage as well as being more powerful, you must first obtain all the basic weapon upgrade cards during the game. This enables us to carefully manage the layout of the weapons and perhaps decide to sell some of them.
Thanks to its procedurally generated maps, Rustic Defense never gets boring, even after dozens of hours of play. Each game is different, so you’ll always be challenged. For instance, a map with few curves will enable enemies to reach your base more quickly. The desire to discover all the enemies, unlock all the heroes and weapons, and complete all the chapters encourages long-term commitment to the game.
Voxel tower defence
While the voxel graphics are nice, I would have preferred an additional zoom level to better appreciate the models’ details. Additionally, the system requirements should be reconsidered. The game runs well even on lower-end configurations. I tested the game on an Intel NUC with an Iris Xe GPU, an Intel i5-1135G7 CPU and 16 GB of RAM, with Arch Linux as the operating system. The game averaged 30 fps at 1080p, and using Gamescope to upscale from a base resolution of 768p to 1080p averaged 60 fps. Given the graphic style, I think the developers should optimise the title and revise the minimum requirements to expand the pool of users willing to play it.
However, I didn’t like the total absence of a tutorial for the upgrade system. In the early stages of the game, I found it difficult to understand how to obtain cards and why the statistics of the structures were always the same when I unlocked upgrades in the menu. It would be helpful to have an introduction to the card system. There is also no explanation of the coin rewards in some chapters. From what I can gather, these can be assigned to a weapon in the skill tree, but this isn’t explained anywhere.
Finally, it is possible to assign attack priority to turrets, but this could be improved. For example, it would be better to be able to select priorities using quick access symbols, rather than having to scroll through ‘strong’, ‘weak’, and so on. This would allow for better management of waves, enabling you to choose to hit the boss and ignore the four minions that, although they can damage you, will not cause you to lose the game.
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