Axon TD: Uprising is a tower defence game from the developers of Element TD. The player must defend an industrial planet from the Axons, robots designed for mining who have rebelled against their creators.


• There’s a strong focus on creating mazes to alter the path the Axons will take to your base by placing towers to block potential routes, and also by adding or removing tiles to change the layout of the map. Some missions also provide destination shifters, which allow the player to relocate the base that the Axons are trying to reach.

• There are several types of Axon who will provide different challenges to the player. Healers will repair nearby Axons, spawners will create more Axons, teleporters will move further along the path when taking damage, hovercraft will fly over your towers and bypass the maze, cloakers will become temporarily invisible to your towers, disablers can temporarily deactivate nearby towers, and builders will temporarily add new tiles to the map to create a shortcut in the maze. And there are several bosses who have large health bars and more unique abilities.

• You’ll start each mission with a number of lives based on the difficulty level. If an Axon reaches your base, you’ll lose some lives, with the exact number depending on the type of Axon. However, if a boss reaches the base, you’ll instantly lose the mission no matter how many lives you had remaining. If you don’t want to replay the whole mission, you can try again from the beginning of the current wave.

• There are 40 different towers to choose from, which includes a mixture of single target and area of effect attacks. While many towers fire in a radius around itself, some fire straight forward in a line, while others are traps which are placed on the path and trigger when an Axon walks over it, and there are drones which follow the targeted Axon until its destroyed.

• Towers can be upgraded with increased damage and special abilities which last for the rest of the mission, or overloaded which provides temporary boosts. Each tower has four upgrade options, and there are several different overloads.

• At the end of each wave, the player will be able to choose between three reward options which will influence your tactics. Credits can be spent on new towers, power can be spent to upgrade or overload towers, and adds/removes will let you change the map layout. You’ll also be offered various special technologies which provide passive bonuses such as regaining lives at the end of each wave, or increasing damage dealt to Axons near the end of their path.

• There are three different game modes. The story campaign features 40 missions, and each mission will have a new tower already placed on the map, which lets you test its functionality before deciding if you want to add it to your loadout in future missions. Quickplay features 21 missions, all towers are unlocked immediately and there are no story cutscenes. Survival is an endless mode which has 4 maps, and new towers will be offered randomly at the end of each wave, which means you might not always be able to use your favourites.

• Some maps will ask you to defend multiple paths between different entrance portals and bases, while other maps will have Axons moving in both directions along the same path, with one groups’ starting point being the other groups’ end point.

• Most maps also have pre-placed generators which will provide extra credits and power at the end of each wave, amplifiers which increase the damage of adjacent towers, and slow fields which reduce the movement speed of nearby Axons. Each item can be activated by placing a tower next to them.

• There are lots of tactical options, which is a good thing most of the time because this provides variety of playing styles. However, there’s also a downside, because when you lose a mission, or lose a large number of lives in a wave, it can sometimes be difficult to understand where you’re going wrong. Is the shape of the maze wrong? Am I using the wrong towers? The wrong upgrades? Should I use overloads more often?

• One mission in particular (the 4th boss mission in story mode) caused me significant problems. I was losing in early waves, even before the boss spawned, and I eventually had to drop the difficulty to easy to get past it. As I beat the first 9 missions on hard and all the other missions on normal, I feel like this one mission is probably just unbalanced. There’s a massive number of enemies incoming from 4 paths simultaneously, and even after redesigning my defences to activate all the credit generators, I felt like I didn’t have anywhere near enough funds to build an effective maze.


• I didn’t like the main characters, a Human and a robot. There were too many attempted jokes which felt out of place or that I simply didn’t find funny. The rest of the story was mostly generic big corporations doing bad things.


• I’m not sure how long the story campaign took to complete, but I’ve played nearly 50 hours across all 3 game modes, which is good value.

• I didn’t have any problems with bugs, crashes or framerate.

• The art style is visually less interesting and colourful compared to Element TD.


Axon TD is a fun tower defence game, which fans of the genre should enjoy, due to the wide variety of enemies, towers, and other tactical options.

Towers? Check
Defenses? Check
Roguelite Survival? Check

Well worth the money.

Great game, it feels like its missing some features but overall its exactly what i want from a TD game