Rustic Defense

Written by Nathan Carter on 12/3/2025 for PC  

When I played UFO 50, my favorite game out of the collection was "Rock On! Island" because it was the kind of tower defense games that I love. Ones where you place a bunch of weapons and traps down and then simply start the wave and let those weapons do all the work. So, when I saw the trailer for Rustic Defense I was immediately intrigued because it reminded me of Rock On! Island. After playing through Rustic Defense, I can say that this game may be one of the most fun tower defense games I have played in a while. It's not perfect but it's very fun and addicting. 

The gameplay in Rustic Defense is pretty simplistic. You start off with a very small area of the map and two weapons unlocked, one of which will always be the crossbow. You only get a little bit of money to start and placing weapons on the map costs money. Once you play a couple of weapons down you will click on one of the arrows you see on the map which will lift the fog, reveal a small chunk of the map in that lane and will start sending enemies towards your homebase.

Your weapons will automatically fire at enemies so what you need to do is focus on placing more and more weapons around the map while they start making their way to your base. You need to pay attention to how many weapons you place because the more of the same type of weapon you place, the higher the cost it takes to place them, so you really need to make sure you are switching up which weapons you place.

At the start you have access to a crossbow, a catapult, a "blower" which is a weapon that blows out debris in a 360-degree attack that will damage anything passing by, a rifle that fires a single shot, and a static machine that will send out lightning bolts to anything that passes by it. I found the best strategy was to start placing as many weapons as I could, mostly crossbows by my main base and building outward from there. By doing this, when the waves started coming, I wasn't even focused on my base as I knew my crossbows would take care of anyone coming near it. So, most of the time I'm looking around and trying to extend the lanes in a specific way so I'm not leaving a small path to my base. 

At waves 13, 24, and 33 (40 and 50 at higher difficulties) you will have boss enemies that show up on the map who have much higher health and if you don't have a ton of weapons then they will easily make it to your base and cause an instant game over. This is where changing how you want your weapons to attack comes into play. Here is a tip. If a boss wave is about to show up, change all of your weapons near your base to fire at the enemy and this will pretty much pick them off pretty well. Especially with the boss the Hydra which usually ended most of my runs as they can paralyze any weapons you have stationed as it moves near them, rendering them inoperable, and allows for the Hydra to just stroll on by unharmed. 

As you level up you also get access to cards that are randomly picked and include the ability to add new weapons to your arsenal, increasing the damage of weapons, decreasing their cooldowns between attacks, increasing their range, and more. There are also Epic cards which can appear as well which are very powerful cards which can have effects like automatically spawning a very powerful weapon for you on the map, greatly increasing the attacks of a certain weapon, or permanently granting elemental effects for the rest of your run like adding fire or poison to weapon attacks. 

Now in terms of difficulty the game will be pretty hard when you first start playing. The reason for this is all of your weapons will be at a very low level until you can level them up in their respective skill trees from the main menu. Every game you finish earns you XP which can be spent in the skill shop.

There are tons of upgradable skills here, including increasing the amount of gold you start the game with, how much damage and cool downs your weapons will have, and eventually you can unlock powerful variations of the weapons, such as a Longbow for the crossbow and a "plaque thrower" for the Catapult which will launch poison at enemies. There are a lot more of these in the skills shop, but you are going to need a ton of XP to unlock them. Even after 30 hours I still don't have everything unlocked, but the ones that are going to take a while to unlock are the extremely powerful weapons, like a turret that spins around blowing fire in every direction, or the laser gun firing off a single powerful shot that explodes and damages everything in the area. 

There are a small number of campaigns to play in the game, such as easy, medium, hard and some harder ones that add gimmicks, but I think my biggest issue is how there isn't any variety in the environments that you play in. As you can see from the pictures I took for this review, there is not much I could do there because, as of now, there is really only one map in the game.

Now, the map does get randomized each time you play, as the lanes will change directions as will the mines and shops, but after a while it does get a little tiring seeing the same areas every game. There are a couple of variations on the map in some of the special missions you get. One special map with harder difficulty will make it a snowy map and another will have balls of lava being randomly thrown over the map which will block the area where it lands and prevent you from placing any weapons on that area. 

There is also the big element of randomness. Everything that do you each game is mostly randomized. The map is randomized, the cards you are dealt are randomized, the special shops and mines that give gold are randomized and because of this, you may get a really unlucky game where you aren't getting any special weapons, can't find the gold mines, and your game comes to an end pretty quick. On the other hand, I had games where I was swimming in gold because I had multiple gold mines right at the start of the map and I was able to pull multiple epic cards as well.

Rustic Defense is a fun little tower defense game. It's not perfect, as I would like to see more maps and some more variation on the one map we do have. But I have put over 30 hours into the game so far and I absolutely love the gameplay loop that's presented here as I love tower defense games that are more about putting traps and weapons down and watching as the destruction unfolds after the waves of enemies start pouring into the map. It is repetitive, but a fun repetitive, and I hope in the future the game is updated to include more scenarios and a new map.