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There is still a choice.

2024 is already halfway through. Among the various new games released this year, many hot topics have emerged, such as "Dragon's Dogma 2", "Sword Star", or the recently released "Elden Ring" DLC "Shadow of the Golden Tree".

However, if you count the works released this year, you will be surprised to find that in terms of popularity and discussion heat, the most eye-catching one is not the masterpieces of those big companies, but a fan work of a stand-alone tower defense game from 15 years ago - "Plants vs. Zombies: Crossover".

This is a fan work of "Plants vs. Zombies" created by "Submarine Weiwei Fan", a B station UP host. In the work, the author took advantage of his huge imagination and created a series of "hybrid plants" and "hybrid zombies" - the hybrid of "pea shooter" and "sunflower", which gave the production tools combat effectiveness, and "newspaper zombie" drove an ice plow, giving a second spring to the old age.

Plants vs. Zombies: Hybrids quickly became a hit in the player community. For several months, discussions about Plants vs. Zombies: Hybrids have been everywhere, whether on TikTok, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, or Baidu Tieba. The developer of this game, "Submarine Weiwei Fan", gained millions of fans on Bilibili in just a few months after the game was launched. The number of views of his thank-you video released on June 1 is now approaching 19 million. This shows how much players love this game.

There are quite complicated reasons behind the huge success of "Plants vs. Zombies: Crossover".

On the one hand, as a "childhood classic", "Plants vs. Zombies" naturally has a certain ability to "break the circle". On the other hand, the imagination of "Plants vs. Zombies: Hybrid" itself also makes this work itself have a wonderful appeal.

In addition to these factors of the game itself, the external gaming environment is also an important reason why "Plants vs. Zombies: Hybrids" can become so popular.

Even the most knowledgeable players have to admit that people who like "tower defense" games nowadays don't have many choices - in a sense, "tower defense" is indeed a declining game category.

"World of Warcraft RPG maps" have long become a thing of the past, and the former "Tower Defense Legends III" has long lost its glory. For example, the orthodox sequels of the "Plants vs. Zombies" series have already shown a trend of being inferior to the previous one. Not only did the second generation fall into the quagmire of krypton gold, but "Plants vs. Zombies 3" also attracted a lot of criticism from fans because of its sudden change in style and unsatisfactory gameplay innovation.

In today's gaming world, "tower defense" is often no longer played as a separate mode of play, but is integrated as a gameplay element into some games that focus on strategy, such as the "Orcs Must Die" series. Pure "tower defense" games are already quite rare.

Especially in the field of mobile games, which is increasingly valued by players, the few "tower defense" games that are still introducing new gameplay are mostly deeply bound to "two-dimensional games", and players who are not interested in the "two-dimensional" style find it difficult to arouse interest in them.

However, at a time when "tower defense" games are declining, a non-"two-dimensional" style "tower defense" mobile game called "Watcher of Realms" has emerged.

"Tide Watcher", launched by Moonton Technology, has quickly become popular since its overseas launch in July last year. On the first day of its launch, it entered the top ten iOS free game charts in many countries and regions such as the United States, France, Germany, and Canada, and even topped the dual-platform download charts in France and Germany.

Overseas players and media are extremely interested in this work. More than 50 gaming media have reported and promoted this game, and the promotional CG of the game itself has exceeded 10 million views on the video platform early on.

In terms of revenue, Tidewatch's performance is equally amazing. According to the report of Diandian Data, its dual-end revenue in the first month of its launch is estimated to have exceeded 65 million. As of May this year, its total revenue is close to 500 million yuan. In the overseas revenue list of Chinese mobile games in April this year, Tidewatch also successfully entered the top 30, with extremely impressive commercial performance.

Image source: SensorTower

Such a brilliant achievement is inseparable from the excellent quality of Tidewatch itself. Whether it is the appearance of the game or the internal gameplay design, this game has given a very beautiful answer.

The unique aesthetic style is the first impression that Tide Watcher gives people.

In recent years, "2D games" have become more and more popular, and Japanese cartoon art styles have become more and more popular. In comparison, other art styles seem niche, and traditional European and American fantasy themes are regarded as "rustic" by many players.

However, the outstanding visual effects of Tide Watcher fully demonstrate that any style has a very high ceiling under the attitude of striving for perfection. In the fantasy aesthetic style, this work chose to emphasize 3D realism - the most difficult route.

This route is equivalent to creating "real fantasy creatures" out of thin air, with great emphasis on the texture of materials and design details, and high requirements for the proportions of character models. If there is any inadequate portrayal, the entire picture will become like "plastic". Fortunately, "Tidewatch" does a good enough job in this regard. Every character in the game has a strong sense of design, and even the armor on ordinary soldiers has very detailed material changes. In the game, each character has added many complex details and layers based on its own design elements. Its three-dimensional sense is enough to support players to zoom in on the character's model in the game. The game also supports players to rotate it 360 degrees for viewing.

Of course, Tidewatch is not just about showing off its muscles in details. They also present quite pure elements in the theme of Western fantasy. The game has more than one hundred heroes and more than thirty races, building a huge epic world view. Players can see the shadows of classic Western fantasy settings such as "Middle-earth" and "Dungeons & Dragons", and they can also find their ingenuity in integrating some novel fantasy elements such as steampunk and Cthulhu into the game settings.

The detailed and excellent settings make the game also show a high level in scene design, which not only integrates the various terrains in the story background of the level, but also presents the unique mechanism of the level itself to a certain extent. This allows "Tide Watcher" to show a very magnificent landscape in the not-so-large scene construction, providing a very good stage for players to play.

From the art design of Tidewatch, we can see the production team's pursuit of excellence, which has made the work have a very brilliant visual effect. Especially in the current era of "second-generation games", the extremely high-level 3D magical art style of Tidewatch is quite "eye-catching".

Of course, for a game, it must have both tangibility and quality. Tidewatch is not only outstanding in its artistic performance, but its gameplay design is also worthy of praise.

As a mobile game with "tower defense" as its core gameplay, "Tide Watcher" uses the "defense tower" design in traditional "tower defense" games, combining it with the more interesting "hero development", turning every hero character in the game into a "defense tower" to block the "monster tide".

Depending on the role of the role - there are five roles in the game: warrior, tank, shooter, mage, and healer - the area where the unit can be placed and the range of attack are different. In addition, each unit in the game has attributes such as "the cost required for placement", "the direction of placement", and "the number of enemies that can be blocked". It can be said that the basic performance of each role alone has built a strategic framework with a certain degree of playability.

At the same time, as players become familiar with the heroes they master, they will soon discover that the camp to which each character belongs will also bring an additional strategy system. There are ten camps in the game, such as "Purgatory" and "Arcane", and the heroes of each camp will be additionally strengthened when the "lord" of the camp appears on the field, which means that the player's pre-battle team combination will become an important factor affecting the outcome.

When facing subsequent high-difficulty levels, or trying to challenge high-intensity levels with low combat power, it is crucial to match the lineup according to the characteristics of the enemy. The game will display the enemy types and specific values ​​in each level in detail. Based on this preparation information, players can continue to specialize their own attack lineup before the battle, making the overall lineup more targeted.

In addition to the pure "tower defense" gameplay, "Tide Watcher" has also developed many gameplay modes with different experiences based on its own RPG game attributes.

The core gameplay modes in the game include traditional "tower defense" levels, "dungeon" levels with specific enemies, and "magic tide" gameplay that combines tower climbing and mowing. In the derived additional gameplay, there are many outstanding special RPG gameplays.

For example, in the "Book of Boss" gameplay, players do not face a "tide of monsters" but a single powerful boss with a specific mechanism. In this gameplay, the player's lineup matching ability will face a more severe test.

In the "Demon Army Expedition" gameplay, there will also be a situation of "reversing Tiangang", where players will no longer play the role of the "defense" side, but instead lead their own monster army to attack other people's defensive formations.

In addition, PVP modes such as "Guild War" and "Arena", and list competition modes such as "Oracle Battle" all have their own fun.

As a brand new "tower defense" mobile game launched in modern times, the game quality presented by "Tide Watcher" is amazing.

It not only has an excellent visual experience brought by the extremely high-level 3D magical art style, but also has a core gameplay with multiple decision-making elements and team building possibilities. The excellent strategic space brought by the continuous deepening of the core gameplay of the game by the producers, as well as the diverse game modes expanded horizontally by the production team, all provide the game with a rich and varied gaming experience.

These core features explain why Tidewatch continues to be popular overseas. At the same time, in a world where tower defense games are no longer popular in the mainstream game market, the success of Tidewatch also shows that the tower defense game still has a broad market for players.

However, the "tower defense" of the new era requires a new era look.

By the way, the Chinese version of "Tidewatch" will start the deletion test on July 30, and will be launched in public beta at the end of this year. Interested players may wish to see if this new work suits their taste.