Remember the good old days of Flash-based arcade games (Kongregate and Newgrounds, anyone?) where gameplay was simple, repetitive, and really, really fun? Tower Destiny Survive remembers. Lots of monsters, lots of weapons, and lots of equipment to collect – what’s not to love?
Tower Destiny Survive – which I’ll just refer to as TDS from here on out – is a new title from SayGames, where you take on the role of a hero who drives his mobile tower to defeat various foes across various dimensions. To achieve your goals, you’ll use an array of fantastic weapons and shiny new equipment.
TDS is a very simple game to pick up and play; a bit of experimentation with the controls should be enough to get you through the game. Nonetheless, if you’re looking for a little extra help with surviving hordes long enough to get a paycheck, this guide is for you!
In this beginner’s guide to TDS, we’ll go over the following topics:
- Game Basics – objectives, mechanics, abilities, and so on.
- Permanent Upgrades – you don’t get to bring your tower to the next stage, but you can get permanent upgrades. Here’s how.
- Game Modes – the different game modes in TDS and what you get from them.
Lastly, if you’re looking for a quick read, feel free to jump to the “Quick Tips” subsections for a TLDR.
Game Basics
First, let’s go over the basics of TDS.
Quick Tips:
- Your objective is to destroy all structures and reach the end of a level. You automatically move to the right.
- Enemies will attack your tower and hero. If your hero runs out of health, you lose the level.
- Dying is part of the game. The core idea of the game is to survive as long as you can, earn gold, and use that gold to buy upgrades and parts to make further progress.
- Your character is equipped with a shotgun, which serves as your “default” weapon. You can hold a finger on the screen if you want to manually aim at targets – great for dispatching flying enemies.
- The tower can have up to 6 sections added to it. Each section can be outfitted with a weapon that automatically fires on enemies.
- There are three general types of weapon attachments:
- Short-ranged defensive weapons that attack enemies that get too close. Ideally, these go on the bottom of the tower.
- Frontal AOE weapons that deal low splash damage in front of them, which are good for thinning out hordes.
- Ranged DPS weapons that can fire at foes regardless of their tower position. Go heavy on these.
- Tower sections can be rearranged by dragging them around.
- Tower sections can be sold by dragging them to the trash can in the upper left. You get a gold refund if you do this.
- Each attachment has an active ability tied to it. Active abilities cost energy, which replenishes on its own while in a stage. You can also watch an ad to get some energy.
- Using an active ability causes all attachments with that ability to use it. Thus, it’s a good idea to go heavy on weapons with abilities that you like.
- Stronger abilities tend to cost more energy.
- You always have access to the grenade ability.
- You can spend gold to upgrade numerous aspects of your tower:
- You can upgrade the health of each section – very important for the lower parts of your tower.
- Weapons can be upgraded to do more damage.
- You can increase your energy regeneration rate with gold.
- If you don’t have enough gold, you can watch an ad. Ad gold has a base amount and is affected by how far you’ve reached in the current level.
- A weapon evolves at every 6th upgrade level. When evolving, you can choose from two random abilities. You can reroll your choices by watching an ad.
- Evolution abilities apply to all weapons of that type that have reached that evolution level. For example, choosing lower cooldown for your first machine gun evolution will cause all evolved machine guns to have that upgrade. As with abilities, it’s a good idea to build multiple weapons of the same type to make your evolutions more effective.
- Each stage is divided into sections which you can see at the top of the screen. Certain sections have chests, which are earned when you destroy the enemy structure at that checkpoint.
- Chest stages contain designs and equipment, but can only be earned once per stage – if you die, the chests you picked up won’t respawn.
- You will lose your tower, all weapons, and gold when completing a stage. Any gold you earn from the winning run will be converted to equipment dust.
Objectives
In TDS, your objective is simple – charge forward and destroy the zombie menace. By destroying all enemy structures, you’ll complete a stage and progress to the next one.
However, your foes will do everything in their power to stop you. Structures will continuously and rapidly spawn more enemies to attack you, and the vicious horde will scratch, punch, and bite at your tower, even climbing on top of each other to reach higher sections. If they get to your guy at the top and he runs out of health, you lose.
[image: swarm, caption: Back to the drawing board.]
Make no mistake – you will die a lot. But don’t worry, as dying is part of the gameplay loop. With each foray, you’ll earn gold that you can use to build your tower and buy various upgrades to hopefully make the next run easier.
Building Your Tower
To push forward against the horde and make progress, you’ll need weapons. Your default weapon is a shotgun – it’s a decent weapon, and you can hold on the screen if you want to change the cone of aim, which is useful for killing flying enemies.
Your main weapon against your foes is your mobile tower. This structurally unsound yet highly versatile war machine can be equipped with multiple weapons to help you thin the hordes and take out the enemy headquarters.
Initially, your tower is a simple cart where your character rides. However, by spending gold (which you get from defeating enemies), you can buy more tower sections, making it harder to get to your hero. Each tower section has its own HP, meaning that the more tower sections you have, the harder it is to get to you.
Each section can also be outfitted with a weapon, which, like your hero, passively attacks enemies. The types of addons you can buy for each tower section differ from stage to stage but generally fall into three categories: short-ranged, frontal area, and ranged DPS.
- Short-ranged attachments, like the saw and shocker, are more of a preventative measure than an active weapon. These addons will deal constant damage to foes that get too near. Note that these weapons don’t do much damage on their own and will need support from other weapons!
- Frontal area attachments, like the flamethrower, are somewhat similar to their short-ranged brethren; where they differ, however, is their range. With the ability to project their shots further than more defensive attachments, these weapons serve as both offense and defense, damaging enemies before they even get near your tower.
- Ranged DPS attachments, like the machine gun, serve only one purpose – dealing damage. Because they shoot projectiles, these attachments can be placed anywhere and still bring the pain. Filling the upper sections of your tower with these attachments is often a good idea.
If you make a mistake with attachments, you can sell a tower section by dragging it to the trash can in the upper left. This will also get you a refund on the spent gold. You can also rearrange tower segments by dragging them around.
Active Abilities
Each attachment comes with an active ability. Abilities are used by spending energy, which accumulates over time while you’re playing. You can also opt to watch an ad for a quick burst of energy.
Energy is used to fuel active abilities, which allow you to deal large bursts of damage. The active abilities you have are dependent on the tower attachments you’ve placed, and using an ability will cause all of them to use that ability. Thus, it’s a good idea to lean into one or two attachment types to maximize the efficiency of active abilities.
It’s up to you to figure out how to best use each active ability, though most of them are useful for culling swarms and bursting down buildings. The stronger the ability, the higher its energy cost. However, you’ll always have your grenade available.
Upgrades and Evolutions
It’s not enough to have a full six-stack tower with weapons. Without upgrades, your weapons and tower won’t be performing as well as they could!
There are several upgrades you can buy:
- You can upgrade the health of each tower section. Generally speaking, this is only needed on the lower levels of your tower. Once you run into stages with more enemies, however, it may be prudent to bulk up even the highest segments of your war machine.
- Each weapon can be upgraded, which increases its damage per shot (per tick in the case of short ranged and frontal area attachments). More important for your ranged DPS towers. You can also evolve these weapons every 6th level – more on that in a bit.
- Energy regeneration. Faster energy regeneration means more ability use. Pretty cheap, but I prefer to put my money into tower upgrades.
Each upgrade costs gold. The higher the upgrade level, the more gold it’ll cost. Luckily, you can watch an ad to get some bonus gold for building your war machine. The amount of gold you get is dependent on how far you’ve gotten in the current stage (but has a different base value depending on how far along in the game you are), and has a 5-minute cooldown.
Evolution is an advanced upgrade that occurs once you level up a weapon enough. Every 6th level, you’ll be prompted to select from one of two upgrades.
This upgrade is permanent and will apply to every attachment of that evolution level. For example, if I choose the 10% stun chance in the image above, every shocker will get that ability once it reaches evolution level one. For this reason, you can reroll your choice of evolution abilities by watching an ad.
As with abilities, this system incentivizes you to build more of a single type of attachment as evolution abilities will allow each of those attachments to perform much better; for example, a single machine gun with 30% less cooldown is nice, but imagine having five of those.
Stage Chests
Each stage is divided into multiple sections. By reaching and destroying the enemy structures in a section with a chest, you’ll be able to nab that chest for yourself.
These chests contain goodies such as equipment designs and gear. However, you can only claim each chest once!
What Carries Over?
Once you reach the end of a stage, your character will jump through a portal to enter the next stage. This means that any upgrades or evolution abilities you get will not carry over. Your gold, however, will be converted to equipment dust.
Fortunately, there is a way to get permanent upgrades.
Permanent Upgrades
Now let’s talk about the various ways to buy permanent upgrades. As enemies become exponentially more powerful in the game, so too must you keep apace of their growth by honing your tower weapons and hero equipment!
Quick Tips:
- Your hero has 4 equipment slots – shotgun, grenade, cap, and armor.
- The shotgun affects hero attack damage.
- The grenade affects the damage of the grenade active ability.
- Both the cap and body armor increase your hero’s health.
- Equipment can be upgraded by spending designs and equipment dust. The higher an equipment’s upgrade level, the higher its base stats.
- Designs and equipment dust come from stage chests and boss mode. You also get equipment dust based on how much gold you had left when you cleared a stage.
- Equipment comes in different rarities. A higher rarity means better stats.
- The main way to get rarer gear is to roll in the gacha. One roll costs 5 gems, but you can also watch an ad thrice a day to get a 3-roll.
- Equipment also comes from stage chests and boss mode.
- Each roll you make in the gear gacha raises your gacha level. A higher gacha level is required for rarer items to drop.
- Weapons can also be permanently upgraded to improve their base damage.
- To upgrade a weapon, you need weapon designs (exclusive to each weapon) as well as golden nuts. Both of these can be acquired in boss mode.
- Boss mode has you fight a single powerful foe.
- Instead of stage checkpoints, you get chests by dealing damage to the boss.
- Damage in boss stages is cumulative. Dealing damage to a boss then dying will keep the damage you did in the previous run.
- The boss you’ll fight depends on your main campaign progress. In most cases, you’ll be fighting the boss of the previous stage you cleared. The weapons you can use are dependent on the stage – if that stage gave you saw/laser/machine gun, those are the weapons you can use in the boss fight.
- Once you get all boss chests, you’ll spend a key. Keys can be acquired from finishing stages or buying them with real money. You don’t get free keys over time.
- Because of how scarce keys are, don’t forget to do your boss mode runs!
Hero Equipment
Since we ended the previous section by mentioning equipment dust, let’s talk about hero equipment first.
Your hero can equip four items: a shotgun, a grenade, a cap, and armor.
- The shotgun determines the base attack damage of your hero. As your hero will always be attacking and be the last to fall in a stage, upgrading your shotgun is very important.
- The grenade affects the efficiency of the grenade active ability. The higher the level of your grenade, the more damage the explosion does.
- Both the cap and body armor increase your hero’s health. Still important, but not as important as buying offensive upgrades.
Each of these pieces of equipment can be upgraded, with each upgrade level boosting its stats. To upgrade equipment, you’ll have to spend designs of that equipment (shotgun/grenade/cap/armor design, exclusively) as well as some equipment dust. Both designs and dust can be acquired from boss mode, and chest stages; you also get dust when you complete a stage based on how much gold you have left; the conversion rate is roughly 10% of whatever gold you were holding.
Equipment comes in different rarities. Unlike the usual common -> rare -> epic -> legendary scheme that most games use, TDS has a…much more involved system. The higher the rarity of an equipment, the better its stats.
Getting equipment is pretty simple – just roll in the gacha. To do that, go to the item shop, scroll to “Summon”, then either spend gems or watch an ad. Each roll will cost you 50 gems, and you can watch ads thrice per day to get three free 3-rolls. While we’re on the topic, you can also watch an ad to get some free gems per day.
If you don’t want to roll in the gacha, you can also play boss stages. However, the equipment you get from the gacha is dependent on your gacha level, which you can see here:
For every roll you perform, you get one point for your gacha level. As your gacha level increases, the item pool widens to include items of higher rarities. You’ll have to keep rolling if you want to get your hands on mythic gear!
Weapon Upgrades
Just like your equipment, your weapons can receive permanent upgrades. Each upgrade to a weapon will permanently increase its base damage, allowing it to remain effective even in higher level stages.
To upgrade your weapons, you’ll need to spend designs (once again exclusive to each weapon type) as well as golden nuts (the mechanical part). To get these, you’ll need to play boss mode.
Boss Mode
Now let’s talk about boss mode. Boss mode pits you against a single, powerful foe. While daunting, you’ll need to face off against these terrors in order to get the equipment and currencies you need to upgrade your stuff.
Boss mode stages play out like regular levels, except that instead of stage checkpoints, there are boss HP thresholds. When you deal enough damage to a boss, you’ll get a chest, and once that boss has no more chests to give, it’s counted as cleared. Note that damage done to a boss is cumulative; if you die, the damage you did in your previous run will still be recorded. This means that you can defeat a boss through sheer hardheadedness…if you have nothing better to do.
The boss you’ll fight depends on your current campaign progress – barring the first boss, you’ll always fight the boss of the stage you’re on. The weapons that are available are the same as the ones you got in the stage.
Once you get all of a boss’s chests, that boss will count as cleared and you’ll spend a key. You get one key for free when you clear a stage, and you can buy more with real money – this also means you get no keys over time. Since keys are so scarce, be sure to always do boss mode whenever you can!
Into the Multiverse!
As I mentioned at the beginning of this guide, TDS is a simple yet fun game. Just grab your gun, arm your tower with your favorite attachments, and charge into the fray!
That concludes this beginner’s guide to TDS, and I hope I was able to help you understand the basics of the game. If you have any corrections to make or any suggestions on how to improve this guide, let us know in the comment area!