Bite-sized Review:
Tower Factory

By Chris Picone, 28 October, 2025

Tower Factory is an interesting tower defence / factory hybrid that I think owes its success to the fact that it doesn't stop there.  As in, it isn't just a TD game with factory mechanics slapped on, or vice versa; it's well-thought-out with both of those concepts in the foreground of the planning and tied together with elements of exploration, becoming its own beast.  

Aesthetics

Graphics are low-res but very well presented. It's all lovely and bright and colourful and it's very easy to see at a glance exactlyl what everything is.  There's a range of climates, starting with some lush green woodlands, but also desert, snow, etc. Each biome also features slight but significant differences that aren't just visual but also affect gameplay. For example, the lush green woodlands feature relatively scattered but very dense trees, which leads to a sprawling but stable Factory build. A later level features thick forests of trees, which makes it trickier to build efficiently, but also each tree contains far less resources, meaning you'll also need to explore and re-build as you wipe forests out. 

Gameplay

The game starts centred on your tower, with most of the world covered in darkness. A path leads to your tower, along which enemy troops will march. You start with two acorn towers and must build a range of other towers to defend yourself.  It's the usual sort of thing: ballistae to pierce armoured troops; catapults to manage swarms; hovering cannons to snipe speedy flyers. But to defend yourself effectively - and to find the enemy tower to beat the level - you will need to build light towers or fires to reveal more of the map. Building takes resources, obviously, but this is no longer automated. Instead, you must actually build your mines and run them via conveyor back to inputs on your tower. And of course the resources are layered in complexity; wood is helpful to start but to build better structures you need a sawmill to refine into planks and so on, and eventually you will upgrade and enable new structures that require new resources and combinations of resources. And of course each resource mines and refines at different rates. This requires you to build a potentially complex factory layout to maximise input and output and manage hubs and splitters and multiple resource streams simultaneously. Resources deplete so you will also need to explore to find more, and then rebuild your factory as you progress - all while trying to build more towers and fight off ever-increasing waves of enemies. 

Verdict

I'm really enjoying Tower Factory and think the developer has done a fantastic job of not only being true to each genre represented here, but an even better job of tying it all together.  I think Tower Factory should appeal to fans of both TD and Factory genres, on the proviso that they aren't vehemently against either. 

Links: 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2707490/Tower_Factory/