Just got the hard badge. The key is having a lot of farms near your starting spot and focusing immediately on getting your number of people up. If you start out with crap next to your base, just reset cause you won't win.
It would be much better if you couldn't get duplicates of the special items. Not really fun getting three copies of the same special bow when you are a mage.
Kokekotan, the first unit always costs 15 gold and it always takes a while before you can afford that. The later levels have more enemies to kill, so the helpers are a bit more useful... but yeah, basically the whole barracks thing is a waste of time.
The soul ball collection mechanic is silly. All it accomplishes is penalizing you for not killing all of your creeps in the same little area. Plus, we don't get credit for soul balls that are on the ground when the level ends, so you also get penalized for killing the last wave all at once, instead of letting the last creep survive for a while so you can pick up the other souls. I think it was a cute idea, but it really does not work.
btw, the best strategies on most levels are using melee guys with splash damage or using massive amounts of archers. In later levels, it works really well to use mages with mana drain (especially the Wizards Pal weapon) and cast Champion over and over. It is pretty easy to end up with +200% damage for all of your units that way.
I love the other games, but this one misses the mark. Upgrading should be simplified and the resource gathering should be either automated or made so that you stop harvesting to kill monsters when they walk by.
I wish we had more time with the good guns. You can only have the best gun for a couple levels, and you can only even do that if you are really careful with your money early on. Would be more fun if we could have them a couple levels earlier. Or if there were bonus levels where you could use them.
Fun game by the way. Balance seemed fine to me, you just have to be good at using bullet time if you want to kill the little creeps.
I love this game, but the targeting logic is still FUBARed. Other TDs let you choose the tower target priority. I REALLY wish this one did too. Part of the problem is that it isn't even obvious what the targeting priority is right now. I think it is that towers prefer to target the highest HP creep from the oldest wave, but I am not certain about that and whatever it is there seems to be a bug where very low HP flying creeps sometimes don't get targeted.
Why don't towers shoot as soon as they can? It seems like they have to acquire a target and then wait as if they are reloading before they can fire. This makes speed of a tower far more important.
The mortar is terrible. It should cost way less and definitely should not be higher level than the missile launcher, which is better in every meaningful way.
Meh, its a decent game, but there are probably 20 or 30 different TDs on Kong already that are better than this one. If you aren't going to add anything original, you should at least manage to copy the best features of the other games.
I agree with most of the comments here. This is a great first attempt. I played straight through and had a fun time doing it. But things can definitely be improved. You should really start the game with the minor healing spell, as it is you have to get really lucky to get it early. Attack spells should a) be usable with a hotkey and b) not be slower than your normal attack. Artifacts should be unique, it isn't fun getting a bunch of the same one. Challenge should scale up on later playthroughs, on my third time I went all 100 levels only casting major heal 4 times and using 0 potions.
btw, there is a bug with instant kills that sometimes lets really fast enemies get free hits on you after you hit them but before they die. The lag time should be fixed. Not a big deal, just thought I would mention it.
Saulens, you assassinate by using an instant kill item. So far I have only seen two instant kill items, one is a mid-level amulet artifact and one is a high level amulet you can buy in a store.
As it is, you have no chance of getting all of the skill achievements prior to completing all of the quests. Not even close, actually. Some of them just require way too much xp to get without massive grinding. Love the game btw!