Thank you Libragames for submitting this game through our Steam Curator! I will always find myself playing some kind of tower defense game as they’re so easy to pick up and play. So of course whenever I find the opportunity to review one, I’ll usually take the chance. Sometimes, we’ll get games through our Steam Curator page and that’s where a few of the more… interesting games can come from. There are some differences between Curator reviews and code-based reviews, such as Curator games are not required to be reviewed, but at least from my experience, I’ve reviewed all but one Steam Curator game I accepted. So this brings us to Soul Dog TD or 犬神ディフェンダーズ if you’re more Japanese inclined. We got a 2D pixel-based tower defense roguelite hybrid game that seems to take inspiration from Vampire Survivors and adjacent games. It breaks down the already simplified subgenre of the strategy genre and displays it in its most straightforward form. The mechanics are very simple to understand, and a successful game shouldn’t take any longer than a half hour. You got one lane with one maiden at the end to defend. Six preset “towers” (actually jet-black colored stickmen) with semi-randomized upgrade paths. Zero resource management. What happens to separate Soul Dog TD from other tower defense games is the few things it manages to do differently.

With no resources to manage, there has to be something, right? And there is! Soul Dog TD has the option for you to toggle your towers to attack or idle. Attacking is self-explanatory, but idling is how your towers gain experience. Experience is how your towers do more damage and advance into the next class, granting them even more damage and even sometimes special abilities. You have to balance between attacking and idling. Too much attacking will cause the enemies to eventually outstat you. Too much idling means you’re not defending your maiden from harm. Then there’s the titular soul dog who also serves a gameplay purpose. The cute Shiba Inu can run across the screen to collect the souls released from defeated enemies. Once you get enough souls, you get a choice between three upgrades. When the dog is running on the screen, your towers can’t attack or gain experience, and he’s not the fastest pup out there. Souls also don’t linger on screen forever so all your decision-making has to count. With all of this stated, the goal is rather simple. Survive 30 waves. Except for your first time, you won’t. This Is where all the roguelite and other Vampire Survivors influence comes in. After finally succumbing to a loss, you get to keep any accumulated gold dropped from enemies. Gold can be used in the skill menu for permanent upgrades, such as a whopping 1% damage increase! But there are a lot of those nodes around, and they are cheap to purchase so they start to add up once you get a good amount of them going. The gold earned can even get you additional playable characters or more upgrade paths for your towers. You can also earn achievements that earn food that can be used to give the little dog some permanent stat buffs of his own. With each upgrade comes the semi-trial-and-error learning experience, such as understanding to have a balance of towers so you don’t end up losing to a wave of flying enemies that are immune to ground moves. Or maybe the metal enemy types that only take one hit point of damage but have low base health numbers, which means I should have faster-attacking units.

Of course, you have to be the type of person who likes a small grind to a destination in the first place, because this isn’t an experience you can brute force. With each playthrough, you’ll make just a bit more and more progress until you finally reach the goal. One thing that did bother me when I first started was the presentation. It isn’t sloppy-looking or anything, but Soul Dog TD on Steam is released in an Early Access format with a very mobile-friendly interface. While I do think the style of gameplay complements mobile devices well—it just bothers me that Soul Dog wasn’t made with computer gamers first in mind. I’ve played many kinds of games where the developers use an existing base in an attempt to grab their target audience. This also does come with the side effect of a lack of option settings. You only have a few toggles for resolution, a basic slider for sound, and no control options. While Soul Dog does mostly use the mouse for navigation, and the A and S keys can be used as hotkeys for some unlocked upgrades—the fact that you can’t change anything at all does disappoint me. Moral warnings and concerns aren’t all that much, but they are more than what the title lets on. The term soul dog translated into Japanese would be “Inugami” according to the developer. Inugami in Japanese folklore tends to be dog spirits that possess something or someone. The story is non-existent when it comes down to it. I only figured it out from the Steam page. Other than that, everything else from slime creatures, chickens, wizards, grim reapers, angels, and dragons take on their typical generic fantasy inspiration. Violence is somewhat displayed in an “RPG style”. Strangely enough, I have to take some points off for sexual content. There’s a playable character called Chloe who is some sort of warrior wearing what seems to be bikini armor. But since everything is so pixelated, you can’t really seem to tell any specific details. Some crude humor exists in the main menu where if you leave it on idle long enough. The dog will take a poop. While Soul Dog TD is in Early Access, outside of additional content, the overall experience will not change much. I found Soul Dog to be a pretty good time that is also very easy to lose yourself in if you’re not careful. As of this review, there are three stages with three playable characters and two difficulty modes with the full game planning to add more of everything, equaling anywhere from 20-30 hours of non-repeatable gameplay. Personally, I’d like to see a Switch/mobile port with cross-save.