TMQFEL is a free to play action rpg with asynchronous multiplayer tower defense and base building mechanics. Although the tone of the game - trying to be humorous - is grating for no reason, I really enjoyed my time with it and would recommend it if you enjoy both base building and loot-driven action rpg dungeon delving.
After selecting a hero and a castle, you build a few pieces of furniture in your small fortress, mines to get you gold and life energy over time, an alchemist, a blacksmith, and things like that. You can improve your chests, your mines and most of your stuff whenever your hero gains a level. Improving your mines allows them to get more money over time, to be able to hold more at once and to get more life. Of course, having to click on things to get your resources is a typical F2P game, if you don't play, you won't get anything, so you better log at least once a day to get your gold and life energy! You have more or less enough gold to buy everything you'd care to buy if you raid enough castles between levels and with the few premium currency they give you, I bought an extra inventory tab.
You can also buy defenses which are either traps or creatures. Traps need power to work - you have a limited number of generators to place around - and they range from rotating flamethrower to spike wheels moving around, it's fun to try and setup a nice range of trap and you have to be careful for friendly fire. Creatures have a few abilities and powers, but they're mostly fodder for enemy heroes. Some of them are really strong - like these spinning dervishes - and some will provide bonuses for the nearby units, but you'll still need a good mix of traps and monsters to have an okay defense. When you're done building your castle, you have to validate it, by which the game means you have to raid your own castle, kill every monster and destroy your mines, both to prove that it's doable and to set a basic per time for other players. The only problem is that you have to validate it even if you just upgrade the life of a mine, they could theoretically add a few seconds to the current time because you've only increased the number of attacks required to break one part of your castle.
And then you go and look at the castles of other players, and you raid them with your mage, warrior or your archer. The goal is to get at the end of the castle while destroying all the mines and killing everything along the way. Then you get a number of stars based on your performance - I'm not sure if you need to destroy all the mines to get three stars, the game never was explicit about that - and you get gold and life force. You also find random pieces of gear laying around and crafting materials - which will be used to make traps and creatures instead of having to spend gold. While you're doing that, other players are attacking your castle as well and you will get stuff if they die in it. Each day, your ranking on the leaderboards are tallied and the more you play, the more bonus rewards you get.
The characters are varied, I've played the mage and he had three skill threes with 4 skills in each of them and you have 4 slots to assign them. Things like fireballs and chain lightning and disabling traps with EMPs. You also have a stuffed equipment screen - something is weird about the UI of the equipment screen, it's sluggish and slow for some reason - and you can equip rings, shoulderpads, weapons and plenty of other things, allowing you to customize your character. Of course, I'm always annoyed when you have two ring slots and you can only compare a new one with the one equipped in the first slot. But besides that, you get more powerful and you learn to use your skills and some castles are easier than others, so you can always get something done. Then you defeat special castles crafted by the game's designers and fight a boss at the end. These castles are usually longer.
TMQFEL is pretty good, I'm not sure why it's free to play but I won't complain about being able to play it for free. I never felt like any other player had an edge on me because of the stuff he bought with real money, maybe the game should surface that? In that case I would know why I lost against these spinning dervish things.
