I was a bit surprised to see a sequel to Infinitode already - since I had discovered the original only a small while ago - but this tower defense game is chuck-full of content with not too much of the usual free-to-play friction that appears in any game supported by that economical model. With tons of missions on each level, an addictive daily quest system, a bunch of upgrades, cool towers and a good difficulty progression, I had a good time with it still and played it a bunch.
The core of Infinitode 2 is quite simple; You alternate between tower defense levels where you’ll build towers of many different types alongside paths where enemies go from one point to another and upgrading these towers and other aspects of the game, unlocking new mechanics over time in order to have better chance to make it further in the tower defense levels, completing missions to get more resources to keep the loop going. There are a few friction points here and there because of the nature of this game, but it otherwise goes very smoothly, especially because I bought the no-ads no-timers permanent upgrade (the only kind of in-app purchase I really feel comfortable about).
The tower defense gameplay also is fairly standard; You have a wide range of towers that go from very simple, to slow but far-reaching snipers, poison or ice to hinder enemies, close-range flamethrowers and piercing lasers and enemies of similarly varied types take more or less damage from these tower types - sometimes they don’t even work on specific enemies a mechanic that works well on paper but it was a bit frustrating and annoying mid battle to check which tower worked on what, because there are a lot of combinations - so you have to balance your defense to be effective against a wider array of foes. Sometimes there are bosses, but they weren’t that memorable or dangerous during my playthrough. Towers have special abilities that you can choose when they get to specific level, so you can customize them, which is also fun.
Each level has a bunch of quests to complete and you can only have two quests active at the same time, so you’ll need to replay them multiple times if you want to do everything in the game. The reward didn’t propel me to do so; There is a mode that allows you to build your own levels in the game and many of prizes you can win for completing objectives are related to that side endeavor. You also get keys and chests and scrolls and a bunch of various currencies that more-or-less always just allows you to research more things in the big skill tree. The locked chests had timers to be decrypted, but that got removed at some point by a patch. You also have to build miners on resource nodes in the tower defense maps, which takes the same money you need to build and upgrade your towers in order to gather some of these resources that you need for permanent upgrades.
At some point you get ‘abilities’, like throwing fireballs on the map, freezing all enemies, and more. These can be upgraded and seemed like they would be a neat addition to give some extra firepower to the player but ultimately I didn’t use them because you have a finite amount and you need resources to replenish them, which totally diminished their appeal. Some other small frustrations popped when I had to have a specific research to play the next level - for arbitrary reasons - and there were no way to get that research except grind. But I still went to the end of the game, getting a few more mechanics - like cores which are per-level skill trees - or enemies walking over tiles along the way.
Infinitode 2 was pretty okay! I bet that me buying the “no-ads no-timers” package was part of it. Having to watch an ad between each level (or something akin to that) would have been disastrous for my enjoyment, but as it was, it almost felt like a traditional tower defense game with a lot of things to do. If I didn’t have anything else to play, I would’ve probably kept going, so that’s a plus for sure!
