TDS: Tower Destiny Survive

The cart is the whole game. It rolls through a city full of zombies, and your job is to make it hard to stop: add blocks to it, place weapons such as flamethrowers and traps, and manage your energy so the cart survives each wave.

Every zombie you knock down pays out coins. Coins go back into upgrades for the cart and its gear, so each upgrade makes the next stretch of road more manageable. The road does not stay the same: the further you get, the harder it becomes, which is why the order of your upgrades matters as much as the upgrades themselves.

Input is kept to one action. On a computer you click, on a phone or tablet you tap, both to make choices and to shoot. There are no keys to learn, so the thinking goes into how the cart is built rather than into your fingers.

• Keep an eye on energy. Poki's description names energy management as part of surviving the waves, so check where it stands before you commit to the next choice.

• Spend coins as you earn them. Coins come from knocked-down zombies and pay for upgrades to the cart and gear; an upgraded cart is what carries you into the harder waves.

• Try more than one kind of weapon. Flamethrowers and traps are both on offer; comparing them on the same stretch of road shows which one fits the way you build.

• Expect the difficulty to climb. When a run ends, the next attempt is a chance to spend coins in a different order, not proof that you missed a trick.

• On a phone, nothing changes. Every action is a tap, so the game plays the same way on a small screen as it does with a mouse.

Players who enjoy putting a defence together and watching it hold, and who prefer choosing upgrades to reacting at speed. It is also a sensible pick for a phone or tablet, since every action is a click or a tap.

— Zombies and weapons such as flamethrowers are the whole setting, which will not suit anyone who would rather avoid that.

— The difficulty keeps rising the further you go, so runs end and start again; that loop is the point of the game, but it can feel repetitive.

— The game opens on poki.com, where Poki may show ads around it.

• Tank Stars →

  Also about choosing firepower and upgrading it with money earned in play.

• Pro Shooter →

  Another action game built around shooting, with a single input to learn.