Isle of Arrows – Tower Defense 9+

When I saw a $5.99 tower defense game I was excited for that price I knew I would be getting some quality and I did! Great art style, interesting gameplay, fun progression but I have 2 main complaints.

#1 IT IS TOO RANDOM!! I wholeheartedly believe that there are some rounds that even the greatest “Isle of Arrows” player on earth has lost before they even place their first tile, because they are going to get SCREWED by RNG. Oh yeah I’m on round 18 and I’ve only been given FIVE towers I can’t imagine why I’ve lost. Or one round where I had an amazing set-up, I even had a second path with tons of towers to boot but I couldn’t get a bomb for over 15 rounds, awesome set-up and 50 coins down the drain just because of RNG.

#2 MURDERS the battery, I can’t play 40 rounds without my phone losing all of it’s battery (and I recently got it replaced) and even if I have it plugged in I can’t play an entire game because it over heats the device and shuts down entirely. RNG

I love Isle of Arrows and have worked through all of the campaign levels exepect for one Merchants Guild in the Burning Embers realm. The variety of towers and relics, randomness and variety of levels, and the option to play the Gauntlet and daily challenges are all great. I keep playing every day. My one major complaint is that I've found the merchant guild levels especially frustrating and I've been playing and replaying the same one again and again and feel totally hamstrung by the RNG quality of the game. I wish that we could do one of the following: 1) keep and use some number of tiles later, 2) have some sort of powerup (other than relics and black market draws) to deal with repeated waves of quick or beefy attackers, especially early in the level when you haven't had a chance to develop your path and towers, or 3) change the weighting of what randomly shows up in the early part of the level to make it more possible to complete.

Despite my frustration with the merchant guild levels I love the game. Thanks for creating it. Hope there are expansions and updates in the works.

Been years since I had this much fun with an app! I lost 2 hours of time last night to this app and it felt like 15 minutes. I cannot wait to try again. This plays and feels like a tile placement board game that morphs into an amazing tower defense experience. It is turn based, not real time. You draw a tile, place it, and initiate the next wave. You can also spend resources to draw new tiles, demolish existing tiles, or build bridges to place new tiles on open air-because you are on a floating island that you need to expand as you play.

It is a beautiful blend of risk-reward resource management, strategic tile placement, and epic tower defense. I also love the artwork. This game screams sophistication and eloquence even as its difficulty slowly builds to crazy hard levels-just wait until you have to manage multiple paths simultaneously! It’s almost unfair how hard (in a good way) it becomes to choose where to allocate your tiles and spend your resources-because the mark of a good tower defense and tile placement board game is all about choice and compromise. The tile draw factor means you probably won’t get what you want so you need to work with what you have.

But your success rewards you with more options to choose from in future games.

I am enjoying this game so much!

My only wish is that it could also be landscape oriented. I play on an iPad 7th gen and it gets tiring holding it in portrait mode.