Thank you ZGameStudio for submitting this through our Steam Curator!

Sometimes I think a company uses a minimalist style for their graphics to either stand out from the crowd, or to stretch their budget as far as possible. Oasis Defense states that it uses a minimalist style, although a true minimalist would be text-based graphics.

Oasis Defense is a tower defense game and a rather simple one to boot. The goal, like many other tower defense games, is to defend the central base from enemies—in this case, the base being a holy tree and the enemies being ghosts. You plant other trees around such as block-shaped shield trees to act as a first-line defense, triangle-shaped arrow trees as the main offense, cylinder-shaped cannon trees that have an area-of-effect on their shots, and oval-shaped water trees that collect resources.

The controls are very simple. WASD can be used to pan the map or zoom in and out. Clicking the squares around the map with the mouse toggles the tree select, where you click the icon twice to place the tree you want. The scroll wheel also zooms and expands the camera.

There is no standard pathway that the enemies follow. The enemies will go anywhere on the grid field except on the black squares—they act like a barrier or no-go zone. Unlike many tower defense games, as long as it isn’t a black square, trees can be placed anywhere. However, water trees can only be placed on green squares. The pace of Oasis Defense is fast as waves are based on the progression of time and not how many ghosts are defeated so the action is ever-present. There’s a sense of strategy taken from the big brother strategy genre as water is your resource, but water is always consumed every five seconds depending on how many non-water trees are placed. It is essential that a balance exists between the trees as too many water trees will lead to wasted resources as the ghost prioritize water trees, while too many attacking trees means that not enough resources can be collected, and a strong wave of enemies can lead to failure.

After every wave, one out of three randomly generated upgrades can be chosen such as increasing the health, damage, or changing the properties of a tree’s attack. The upgrade system can lead to repeated levels feeling different and having different outcomes, but it personally lead to the biggest issue I had. The upgrade system isn’t exactly balanced as some upgrades are better than others. Some upgrades may even be preferable on certain stages than others, but since you don’t exactly have the choice of what upgrades you want, many levels can lead to an unavoidable loss no matter what strategy you had.

Only one musical track in the game exists and it plays throughout. The track itself is not bad, but with no way to adjust the music within the game, it’ll end up sounding repetitive eventually. The sound effects for shots fired are basic and inoffensive.

A strange aspect I noticed about Oasis Defense is that it seems to be designed for mobile devices in mind, but I can only find the game available on Steam. The icons are large and easy to understand. It does end up harming the presentation a bit since a mobile version as of right now doesn’t exist.

With 40 levels in total, Oasis Defense can hold attention for at least four hours. Replay value exists as each level has an endless mode variant for it and the features are simple enough for even a beginner to understand. It does what it set out to do, but for me, it wasn’t enough. It is a competent tower defense game, but just being competent isn’t sufficient, and it left me unsatisfied in the end. Someone looking for a simple tower defense game will most likely be happy with this while others that share my viewpoint may want to seek tower defense pleasures elsewhere.