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TOWER-DEFENSE
Alien Overrun Review: A Tower Defense Game That Thinks It's an RTS (Spoiler: It's Not Fooling Anyone)
Look, I've played tower defense games since before half of you were born, and Alien Overrun wants me to believe it's bringing something new to the table by slapping 'light RTS' on the description. Let me tell you what I found when I reluctantly gave it a shot.
Paul
January 27, 2026
5.2
Overall Score
"Alien Overrun is the gaming equivalent of plain oatmeal—it's edible, it won't kill you, and technically it counts as breakfast, but nobody's writing home about it."
First Impressions (Or: Why I Almost Closed the Tab Immediately)
The moment I loaded Alien Overrun, I knew exactly what I was in for. Mages building enclaves? Defending humanity? I've seen this setup in approximately seventeen thousand games, and about sixteen of them did it well. The menu screen greets you with all the charm of a Windows 95 screensaver, and the premise—aliens invading, you build towers, surprise surprise—is about as innovative as sliced bread. Except sliced bread was actually innovative once. This game opens with the energy of 'we have a tower defense game at home,' and honestly, I respect the Gamkedo Club collaboration effort here, but collaboration doesn't automatically equal quality. I can get five friends together to make a sandwich, doesn't mean it'll be edible. Still, it's free, so I couldn't justify closing it within the first thirty seconds like I usually do. I gave it the full five minutes before making my judgment.
The 'RTS Elements' That Aren't Really RTS Elements
Let's address the elephant in the room: this game calls itself a tower defense/light RTS hybrid. I've been playing RTS games since Command & Conquer made me realize I could waste entire weekends, and let me tell you, having a couple of resource management options does not make you an RTS. That's like calling chess a racing game because the pieces move. You gather resources, sure. You make some strategic decisions about placement, absolutely. But where's the base building complexity? Where's the unit micro? Where's the satisfaction of perfectly executing a three-pronged attack? It's not here, because this is a tower defense game with delusions of grandeur. The resource gathering adds a layer, I'll give them that, but it's more tedious than strategic. I spent half my time clicking on resource nodes thinking 'Warcraft III did this better twenty years ago.' The tower placement is standard fare—find the chokepoints, spam your best towers, pray the waves don't overwhelm you. I've done this dance before, and the music hasn't changed.
Waves of Aliens That All Blur Together
The enemy variety here is what I call 'technically present.' Yes, there are different types of aliens. Yes, they have different abilities. Do I care about any of them? Absolutely not. They're the video game equivalent of elevator music—there, functional, completely forgettable. I fought through wave after wave, and by wave fifteen, I couldn't tell you the difference between the blue alien and the green alien beyond 'one dies faster.' This is where the game really shows its indie roots. Back in my day, Defense Grid gave every enemy a personality, a role, a reason to adjust your strategy. Here, the strategy is 'build more towers' regardless of what's coming at you. The difficulty curve exists, which is more than I can say for some games, but it's less of a curve and more of a gentle slope that occasionally has a spike just to remind you it's still technically a challenge. I never felt genuinely threatened, just mildly inconvenienced, like getting a rock in my shoe during a walk I didn't want to take anyway.
Visuals and Audio: A Love Letter to Mediocrity
The art style here can best be described as 'asset store fantasy meets discount sci-fi.' The mage enclaves look like someone googled 'fantasy tower' and used the first result, while the aliens have all the visual menace of rubber toys. Nothing is offensively ugly—I've seen far worse from solo developers with more ambition than talent—but nothing stands out either. It's aggressively okay. The kind of art that makes you shrug and move on with your life. And the audio? Oh, the audio. The background music is the kind of generic fantasy orchestration that makes you wonder if computers have achieved sentience and started composing their own royalty-free tracks. The sound effects are there. Towers go pew pew. Aliens go splat. It's functional. I muted it after twenty minutes and put on my own music, which improved the experience considerably. When silence is an upgrade, you know you've got problems. Kingdom Rush understood that audio could elevate a tower defense game. This is not Kingdom Rush.
What This Game Actually Gets Right (Against My Better Judgment)
Alright, fine. I'll be fair. Alien Overrun does a few things that didn't make me want to write angry emails. The resource management, while not revolutionary, does add a layer of planning that kept my brain slightly more engaged than pure tower defense. I had to think about which enclaves to upgrade, when to expand, how to balance offense and economy. It's basic, but it works. The wave structure is paced well enough that I never felt like I was waiting forever or being rushed. That's harder to get right than you'd think, and they nailed it. The difficulty is fair—I died because I made bad choices, not because the game cheated or had broken mechanics. For a Gamkedo Club project with one person doing most of the programming, it's stable. I didn't encounter game-breaking bugs. It didn't crash. The towers do what they're supposed to do. In an era where I've reviewed games that can't even launch properly, that's worth acknowledging. This is competent. Boring, derivative, and stuck in 2010, but competent.
The Verdict: Should You Play This?
Here's the thing: if you're desperate for a tower defense game and you've somehow exhausted every other option on the internet, Alien Overrun will occupy an afternoon. It won't blow your mind. It won't make you rethink the genre. It won't give you moments you'll remember next week. But it exists, it functions, and it's free. The 'RTS elements' are marketing fluff, the presentation is forgettable, and the whole experience feels like a game jam project that got slightly more polish than usual. Kornel and the Gamkedo team clearly put work into this, and I respect the craft even when I don't love the result. It's not broken. It's not insulting. It's just... there. Like elevator music, or beige walls, or that one relative at family gatherings who never says anything interesting but also never causes problems. If you want actual innovation in tower defense, play Kingdom Rush. If you want RTS, play StarCraft. If you want something free to kill time while waiting for a better game to download, sure, give this a shot.
Rating Breakdown
Quality
5.5
Functional enough that I didn't rage-quit from bugs, but the UI feels like it was designed by someone who's never heard of user experience—everything works, barely.
Innovation
4
Calling this a tower defense/RTS hybrid is like calling a sandwich with lettuce a salad—it's still just tower defense with extra steps I didn't ask for.
Value
6.5
It's free on itch.io, which automatically makes it better value than 90% of the overpriced garbage I review, even if I wouldn't pay actual money for this.
Gameplay
5
The core loop kept me playing longer than I expected, mostly because I'm stubborn and wanted to prove I could beat it, not because I was having fun.
Audio/Visual
4.5
Generic fantasy aesthetic meets budget sci-fi aliens with sound design that makes me miss the days when games didn't have sound at all—at least then I could make my own.
Replayability
5.5
Maybe I'd play it again if I was stuck on a desert island with nothing but this and Minesweeper, and even then I'd probably just get really good at Minesweeper.
What Didn't Annoy Me
Actually stable and playable without game-breaking bugs, which apparently makes it exceptional these days
Resource management adds just enough thinking to keep me from falling asleep entirely
Fair difficulty that respects basic game design principles, even if it doesn't do anything interesting with them
It's free, which means I can't complain about wasting money, only time
Wave pacing is competent enough that I never felt like throwing my keyboard
The collaboration effort shows in the stability, even if it doesn't show in the innovation
What Made Me Sigh
Calling this an RTS is like calling a bicycle a motorcycle because it has wheels
Visuals are aggressively generic fantasy meets budget sci-fi with zero personality
Enemy variety exists on paper but not in practice—I stopped caring about alien types by wave ten
Audio design that made me grateful for the mute button within twenty minutes
Zero innovation beyond 'tower defense but with resource nodes you click sometimes'
Final Verdict
Alien Overrun is the gaming equivalent of plain oatmeal—it's edible, it won't kill you, and technically it counts as breakfast, but nobody's writing home about it. For a free itch.io game made by a collaboration team, it's stable and functional, which puts it ahead of half the garbage I review. But 'not broken' isn't the same as 'good,' and this game settles for competent mediocrity with all the enthusiasm of someone filling out tax forms. The tower defense works. The light RTS elements are neither light nor particularly RTS-y. If you've got time to kill and you've exhausted literally every other option, sure, download it. Just don't expect anything you haven't seen done better a decade ago. I've played it so you know exactly what you're getting: a perfectly average tower defense game that thinks adding resource gathering makes it special. It doesn't.
Alien Overrun
Tags
tower-defense
rts
strategy
aliens
defense
fantasy
indie
free
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