• Price: $9.99 USD (currently on sale for $7.49 until June 26th)
• Developer: MadGamesmith
• Publisher: Gaming Factory
• Release Date: June 12, 2024

A review code was kindly provided by Game Factory on behalf of MadGamesmith. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

I’ve always found history extremely interesting, so playing Lesson Learned, a tower defense game in which you travel through history, sounded good to me! Control Frank and assign gathering and building tasks to his classmates after freeing them from the enemy. Play in single player or co-op mode.

You start the game in the prehistoric era and play through a brief tutorial stage. Choose between the easy, normal, or hard difficulty levels for each stage. There are 3 bonus objectives for each stage at each difficulty, and you can earn badges for completing them (the purpose of which is unclear):

• Win without getting knocked out
• Win without base damage
• Win without minion getting hurt

Other than a few adorable sketches with accompanying text, we don’t really get much of an explanation as to why these enemies are coming for Frank and his classmates. It was a little disappointing to not have a real story or character interactions at all, as I would have hoped for one based on the historical eras for each stage.

That being said, you don’t need to know why someone is attacking to defend yourself, so gather materials such as wood, stone, and (oddly enough) some slime to build defenses against the approaching waves of enemies, which are adorable animals in historically appropriate armor.

You can pick up smaller bundles of wood and stone right away, but it takes a long time for Frank and his classmates to chop down trees or wear down larger rocks. There isn’t an option to upgrade gathering abilities to go faster or let you gather more materials at a time.

I wish that the materials we gathered were automatically deposited into the stockpile for immediate use, but instead you have to haul them all the way to your base each time before you can pick up anything else. (I also wish we could have unlocked some kind of backpack upgrade for this.)

This is a real inconvenience considering that your base moves further and further away from the enemies’ starting point during cooldown periods between waves. I didn’t feel like I had enough time in between enemy appearances to deliver materials to my base and make it back to the frontlines in a timely manner – even with my minions helping me.

My biggest issue with the game is that your “minions” seem to completely depend on your directions to do anything. I had to click on wood and rock sources to get them to gather anything for me. They’d automatically deliver the materials I had them gather, but after that I’d have to assign them more tasks to prevent them from following me around without purpose. It would have been nice if we could have assigned each minion a constant role/task they’d complete automatically.

I also didn’t feel like they explained certain mechanics. It took me a while to realize why I couldn’t pick up more materials at the same time, and it also wasn’t explicitly stated that we couldn’t put defenses on paths. The game didn’t display what upgrade materials were required to improve defenses, so I had to figure out that I needed to use the slimes dropped by enemies for that.

Eventually I reached a stage where the enemies started coming from another side of the path. I didn’t even realize that was possible until it happened and I lost. You need to look at the map to make sure you don’t have enemies coming from multiple entrances.

Anyways, in each stage they display the order of events at the top of the screen to let you know what’s coming. It tells you what kind of enemy will appear in each wave, with cooldown periods in between each wave to let you catch your breath and continue developing your defenses. Each type of tower is more effective against certain enemies, so knowing what’s coming allows you to build the ones you need ahead of time.

You start out with a basic defense tower, and unlock new towers as you progress through the stages. These defenses will automatically shoot at enemies, who will do their best to destroy the towers as they advance. But their primary objective is to destroy your base; if the base loses all of its HP, you lose.

That’s why it’s important to build as many towers as you can to kill off the enemy before they can reach your base. As Frank, you can use a slingshot to whittle down enemy HP as they appear on the screen. I don’t think it does a ton of damage, but some is better than none, and you can also pick up fire and poison projectiles dropped by enemies. A number appears above Frank to let you know how long you can use them.

Again, I was disappointed that we can’t unlock any kind of permanent upgrades. I would have liked to increase his slingshot’s attack, and maybe even his speed and range.

Preventing enemies from hitting Frank is kind of important, as that will temporarily stun him and prevent you from attacking with the slingshot. Your allies can also be “knocked down” and will become unavailable. But I don’t believe damage to Frank and his teammates can cause you to lose (I never experienced it). The only thing that seems to matter is that your base is protected. (Sadly, we can’t upgrade the base’s HP or defense, either.)

I liked that we can send minions to repair damaged towers. If the enemy does manage to destroy a tower, you can at least get back some of the materials used in its construction. I also appreciated how we can either restart a stage or start from the last checkpoint if we lose.

If you successfully complete a stage, you’ll get “Artifacts” dropped by enemies, which act as the currency for unlocking upgrades for each type of tower. There are 2-3 upgrades for each tower, which can be purchased from the upgrade shop. You can replay previous stages if you want to in order to earn more Artifacts. (But it’s not possible to use towers unlocked after a stage or minions acquired afterwards, either).

I tend to enjoy games with a lot of upgrade options, but I think that Lesson Learned doesn’t live up to its potential. The basic concept is good, but ultimately the execution isn’t as strong as it could’ve been. The gameplay started to feel overly repetitive around the second group of stages; it’s not bad so much as it doesn’t do enough to stand out or keep me engaged.

The repetitive nature weakens the game’s appeal as a tower defense game, especially because the stages are fairly lengthy. Some of my other criticisms are a bit more subjective, as I came into this with the assumption that I would be getting more historical content than I got. I wasn’t expecting an epic narrative by any means, but didn’t feel like enough was done to establish the setting. Even using different music tracks to match the theme of the time period for a stage could have helped.

They did include some history tidbits though, such as the boss descriptions. One of the game’s greatest strengths is its art – I really loved the enemy designs. Lesson Learned earns a “Needs Improvement” from me on its progress report, but I like its foundations.