Bite-sized Review:
Gnomes

By Chris Picone, 04 April, 2025

Gnomes is a quirky new tower defence games with a ton of differences that separate it from a fairly crowded market.  First: It's about gnomes defending their garden from goblins, a relatively unusual but very cool theme.  But it also has a few other unusual mechanics. It's quirky and full of attitude and I love it.

Aesthetics

Other than the cover art, Gnomes is full of super cute micro pixels! It's great quality; it looks fantastic but also manages to convey a lot of subtle information very clearly and effectively. For example, there are a ton of different plants and weeds; daisies, roses, yams, pumpkins, lantana, beans, and they're all easy distinguishable from one another.  That's impressive given the scale. Gnomes also features a great original soundtrack that'll keep you feeling suitably tense as the levels ramp up. There are eight maps in total, across a range of biomes; forest, desert, the usual, but also tundra, wasteland, and graveyard. It's great for variety but also have a big impact on gameplay.

Gameplay

The core concept is the same as any tower defence; the enemy starts at a spawn point and heads for your base. You pay for and place a gnome (and a cute little house for him to live in), and the gnome stabs anything that comes into range. Unlike many TD games (but like many others), your income doesn't come from killing baddies, it comes from planting crops. Spend money buying more crops when you can, and more gnomes as you need to. You can also purchase new buildings, gnome types, and bonus-inducing artefacts every turn - if you have the coin, of course.  These aren't just token upgrades either; you can run some very quirky but effective builds based on some weird synergy around the game mechanics. This is also what makes Gnomes' guild system so effective. There are a range of (16!) playable guilds, including rogues, lumberjacks, wizards, scavengers, but also gardeners, squatters, vampires, the inquisition, and weeds. Seriously. And this is where the weird synergies make the game so much fun. The vampires, for example, want you to take damage to produce your income, which you then use to buy the rose crop (which heals you when trampled) to offset the damage. You can buy artefacts to leverage this weird interaction in lots of ways. The "weed' guild is another great example.  Although you can still buy gnomes, this guild doesn't start with enemy, and you don't even necessarily need them. It starts with some crops and weeds and artefacts that help both of those spread and have additional benefits when trampled that you can leverage.  Gnomes really features some fascinating mechanics and some really unusual interactions and that's what really made me fall in love with the game. The enemy spawn points and paths change every wave so you can never get comfortable, you have to rethink your strategy all the time. And there's a lot to think about. Placing gnomes or buildings force goblins to redirect their paths so you can push them into kill zones, or into environmental traps (swamps, lava), away from your precious crops - or into them (some do damage when trampled). I was genuinely impressed at how much the biomes change the feel of the game. It's not just the environmental hazards, it's the amount of fertile land and resources available, and the method of mining them. A strategy that annihilates one level totally flounders on another. Oh! And every level also features an insanely hard boss fight at the end.  Good luck!

Verdict

Gnomes is awesome.  It's an incredibly addictive game, both because the constant unlocking of new guilds and maps keeps you going back for more, but the challenge of trying to win a particular map with a particular guild is also surprisingly addictive! And if that weren't enough, Gnomes also includes an awesome daily run feature, which provides what I like to think of as a challenging and unique puzzle each day that has had me going back for more long after I had unlocked everything.

Links: 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3133060/Gnomes/