There is not much to say about Demons vs Fairyland as it reminds me of many other tower defence games with a few things thrown in there to try and change the basic gameplay structure. I can’t say that I’m a fan of some of these things and while playing on easy, I’ve found the game too difficulty - a fact that is only exacerbated by the pay-to-win items you can buy.
A bit like Cursed Treasure TD, you have five ‘items’ you need to protect from enemy waves, the enemies go through a path and try to take the item out of the map. If all items are gone, it’s game over. Like that other TD I mentioned, you have three types of towers - and related skill trees - skeletons that ‘block’ enemies, rapid firing archers and slow spellcasters. The skeletons remind me of Kingdom Rush, where units block the path of enemies to fight against them. You can’t build any tower where you want, you have to build a supporting building first and then you can build useful towers in the range of that building. I find that annoying, you have little space in some levels, the supporting buildings cost money and they have only a single upgrade, making them necessary paperweights that you have to cram in there. There is also one support tower per type to give a little bonus to your surrounding units, but with no upgrades possible
You have mana that regenerates over time and you can cast a few spells - summon a zombie or kill enemies with fire and lightning - enemies have various types, healers, tanks, flying enemies, ranged attackers, fast swarmers, etc. Their AI is sometimes very weird, like that one level where the last kid was right there and everyone spent their time going the wrong way where the kids should be, finding nothing and going out of the maze empty handed.If you start with the bad towers, if you place your skeletons and ranged attackers in weird spots or if you just don’t see what you ‘should’ do, you can lose 3-4 kids on the early waves. That happened to me even on ‘easy’ difficulty. You can also pay premium currency to use very powerful spells, which leaves me wondering if you can theoretically 3-star each level on the first run without using these abilities.
You also get items that passively give you bonuses, the ones I had were quite inconsequential and gave boosts to abilities and towers I rarely used. You gain stars for completing levels masterfully, but they don’t seem to unlock anything, maybe there should be item unlocks linked to the number of stars you have to motivate the player to get them. There are some aspects of DvF that I enjoyed - I always love towers with upgrade paths and different abilities depending of the path you take and ability trees - although quite thin in valuable choices, I’ve found but overall, it plays like a run of the mill tower defence made of bits and pieces from other games in the genre.
