After a decade of delays, Defenders Quest 2 is finally out, bringing with it wild character designs and nostalgic tower defense shenanigans

The first thought that popped into my head upon dipping my toes into Defender’s Quest 2: Mists of Ruin is that they don’t make tower defense games like this anymore. The second thought was that my tea was suddenly stone cold and that the past four hours had mysteriously disappeared. This is pure videogame comfort food, if you’ve even the slightest bit of nostalgia for the latter era of flash game design, and the boom of the indie scene. This may be a relic lost in time, after over a decade of delays, but it still shines bright.

If you’ve never played the original Defender’s Quest (which still holds up to this day), what you’re getting here is old-school numberwang tower defense. Waves of increasingly tough and devious critters travel across a maze to kick over your base, and you’ve got to stop them before that happens. Rather than spamming walls and towers, the Defender’s Quest games have you managing a party of heroes, levelling them up and equipping them, min-maxing skill trees and boosting their strength (or relocating them) using the resources you build up within each mission. And for when push really comes to shove, you can spend some of your energy on special powers to slow or directly damage enemies that might have slipped past your net.

This sequel doesn’t shake up the first game’s formula too much, although the characters and their abilities are a bit more distinct and unusual, like a character that can teleport between two points or a high-cost colossus that requires four tiles to place, encouraging fresh strategies. Where Defender’s Quest 2 doesn’t retread old ground is in its setting and story. While the first game was pretty boilerplate swords and sorcery, this game is set in a lurid, pseudo-oceanic science-fantasy world where the rich and powerful live on a shrinking archipelago of islands above a sea of reality-warping fog, and crews of bounty hunters and pirates travel above and below the ‘tide’ on biomechanical land-ships, battling each other and the monsters spawned from below.

It’s all depicted through some lovely watercolor comic-style art, big chunky sprites in battle and featuring a very unusual cast of characters, all brought to life by Xalavier Nelson Jr (most recently behind I Am Your Beast and El Paso Elsewhere), who in a previous life was also a PC Gamer contributor. As you might expect, he doesn’t hold back on the jokes (a hallmark of the first game), but the tone is somewhat heavier here than in the original, as the cast wrestle with their own demons in-between smacking seven shades out of pseudo-sea monsters.

As a final aside, about 10 missions into Defender’s Quest 2, I had an epiphany: This all feels a lot like narrative-heavy mobile tower defense hit Arknights. And then it clicked that the original game must have been pretty influential. Maybe they still do make them like they used to. While Defender’s Quest 2 doesn’t feel quite cutting edge anymore, I can only hope that it draws a fraction of the players that Chinese studio Hypergryph introduced to the formula in the intervening years. Defender’s Quest 2: Mist Of Ruin is out now on Steam for £15.07/$17.99.