I’ve been addicted to the tower defense genre ever since I came across Gemcraft. As the next installment of Gemcraft is three months overdue (I swear, these people are worse with deadlines than GRRM), and probably won’t be out for still a while yet, do you have any other TD games to recommend?
Well, since you’re even mentioning tower defense I don’t suppose it’s worth bringing up Warcraft III which hosts a mindboggling array of almost completely identical TD maps.
Mafa is consistently pretty good, if you can get over the exponential learning curve.
Desktop Tower Defense.
Balloon Tower Defense.
Both free flash games.
Here ya go! Don’t blame me if you’re late for work for the next two months 
I bought Defense Grid a few weeks ago. I don’t know if you’re addicted enough to spend twenty bucks, but I thought it was money well spent. There’s a lot of good maps, about a dozen different towers (that are all strategically distinct), and it’s purty. Play the demo first.
Bigfish games released a fun tower defense game called Plant This (or something similar) a few days ago. You may wish to look into that.
I recently discovered Whiteboard Tower Defense. It seems overly simplistic - you have the typical array of towers to choose from (fast /light damage,slow/heavy,freeze, etc.) but you start out with a lot more money, and a completely blank map - you have to build the route with your towers as you go. So it really turns the typical tower defense strategy on its ear, since you have to not only worry about upgrade strategy, but you also need to take care not to have a short track or the bad guys get away too quickly.
Aren’t the majority of tower games like this?
Just popped in to agree here, Defense grid is pretty neat, and well worth that money.
You can find one of my favorites on that site, Antbuster. You’re defending a cake from an army of ants. You have a wide variety of upgrade paths for your towers, some work great, some suck. You also get to “target” particular ants, if they happen to be dragging away a piece of your cake. Don’t read any walkthrus or hints, there are a couple of strategies that really work well, but most of the fun is in learning about them instead of starting right away with the best strategy and seeing how far you can go.
Thanks! I have actually been a regular visitor at towerdefense.net, I was just wondering about games that weren’t featured there. The whiteboard game looks interesting, although so far I havn’t managed to beat it.
No, the standard ones have a predefined path along which you need to place the towers. Even if you put nothing down, the enemy would still travel along that path.
Nonetheless, there are a lot of Tower Defense games that don’t have pre-defined tracks – the very popular Desktop Tower Defense being one of the most notable.
Here’s another site with a few tower defense games, including multiplayer and a newer Desktop Tower Defense than most sites seem to have: KIXEYE.com
Thirding Defense Grid: The Awakening. I was on the fence about it for a while, since there’s oodles of free TD games out there, but finally decided to get it. Some of the levels allow you to make your own paths with some restrictions, it’s not just a blank square where you can build anywhere you want, and some have predefined paths with limited tower sites. Obviously the graphics are much, much better than you find in the free games, and the game is pretty well balanced - you can use a lot of different towers or stick to a few types. It’s pretty tough too, some of the levels are very difficult, and usually once you beat a level you can play it over on a few different modes. It’s a great game and I’d recommend it.
I second Warcraft III. It’s where the modern tower defence genre was developed before jumping to flash. There are thousands of TD maps, all offering different experiences, some of which will absolutely blow you away compared to the flash versions.
Also you can pick up the battlechest for like, 10 bucks.
I’ve been dinking around with the Bloons and a few other track-based ones - but this one is fun. In fact, it seems the Whiteboard game is a blatant minimalist knockoff.
I’ll have my employer send you a bill for lost productivity.