- A tower defence with creatures as towers
- Combine creatures, turrets, and traps to win
- Conserve, strategise, and unleash!
Of all the gaming styles that have lingered throughout the years, Tower Defense persevered like its namesake defensive tower. It’s one of the more passive and casual versions of strategy out there since all you need to do is decide what tower goes where and then they’ll do the rest.
Your towers don’t often have personalities that make you want to cheer them on. Anxious Noob saw this and head-canonically decided to work on Bean Beasts, an upcoming pixel-art Tower Defense game with cute creatures. With all that natural power and engineering ingenuity, how could you lose any battle? Well, you still need to make good choices.
What is Bean Beasts?
A long time ago, on an island far away, an explorer went to find something but never returned. It’s a classic call to adventure that the average person would ignore, but this is Bean Beasts. The descendant of a curious humanoid lizard explorer has decided to pick up where his ancestor left off.
Driven by curiosity and a desire to show that he can do better, the young explorer arrives on the island with a bow, a large turtle, and his trap designs, and befriends some local creatures that feed on beans. Dubbing them “Bean Beasts”, he soon learns that not all wildlife on this island are friendly, so he must team up with his new friends and build traps to protect his group and delve deeper into the island.
Refried Bean Beasts
Just so we’re clear, refried beans are a positive thing and just like Bean Beasts, they’ll leave a good taste in your mouth. Coming out of the gate, the pixel art and animation are at a nice level to convey the colour and character that this is going for. The more bean beasts you recruit to your side, the more excited you are to place them on the field, watch their powers, and pump them full of XP to help them achieve their final form. Even the explorer and his turtle get their time to shine while they’re idling and unleashing life-saving ultimate moves.
The levels are what you’d expect from a traditional Tower Defense setup. The explorer claims to be on one side of the area while all the hostile wildlife will take different (but interestingly straight) paths to his location. You’ve got both the ground and elevated earth to place your beasts, towers, and traps.
With all the options you’ve got to work with, every mistake feels genuine since you weren’t thinking creatively. That being said, there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing an enemy get hit by a trap, shot by a tower, and smacked by a bean beast all at once.
On that note about options, the challenge becomes apparent quite quickly. Even from the earliest levels, your most significant limitation is your resources. You need beans to summon your beasts, energy to build your contraptions, and time to charge your ultimates. The waves do a good job of lulling you in, making you think you can create a reserve, and then suddenly hit you with crystal bug monsters that have no doubt lived through volcanic eruptions. The moment you’re hoping you have an ultimate to spare is when the tension takes over.
Bean there, Bean Beasts
The biggest selling point of this experience is that towers aren’t the main stars of your defences; they are the little bean beasts. However, can you just go out and recruit new ones or tame them on your side? No, you must unlock them via progress or by completing challenges and buying them from the catalogue.
On top of that, you only get three slots to hold them, and you can only place one of each on the field. If you were looking forward to having an army of cute crushing critters as your primary defence, you’ll just have to tailor your expectations. Although this is still in development – who knows how our interactions with the bean beasts will change in the future?
Spill a can of Bean Beasts
Bean Beasts is an upcoming 2D pixel art tower defence game about exploring an island while defending yourself with friendly bean creatures and your own engineered traps and towers. It looks and feels fun, has a lot of variety in what you can place, and a good amount of challenge that will keep you from getting too comfortable.
The beasts themselves are not as prominent as they could be with the restrictions they have, but there’s still time for them to burst forth onto the stage and into our hearts. When it finally releases (for both PC and mobile at an unconfirmed date, but hopefully later this year), we’ll all have to ask ourselves: “To bean, or not to bean…That is the question, you beasts.”
