Video Game / Infinitode 2

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Infinitode 2 is a Tower Defense game for smartphones and computers running Windows by Prineside released in 2019. It is the sequel to Infinitode, with new gameplay mechanics like mining for resources, quests for each map, customisable music, and boss fights. There are also some new towers to play with, like Flamethrower, Laser, and Gauss.

An upcoming sequel, tentatively titled Infinitode 3, was announced on the developer's blog👁 Image
in 2023. It is planned for release on Android, as well as on Windows and Linux (including Steam Deck) via Steam, however the developer also made it a point that this game will not be coming to Mac or iOS.

This game provides examples of:

• Adaptive Ability: When a Light enemy takes damage, it becomes immune to that tower's attacks for 6 seconds (though despite what the name would suggest, it only lowers damage taken by 80%), then restores this ability in 4 seconds, where it then can receive a new immunity.
• Anti-Armor: The Missile Tower's level 10 ability, Outweighed Shells, causes the tower's missiles to inflict more damage to enemies whose HP is above a set percentage threshold. A Tech Tree upgrade lowers the required percentage for this ability to take effect.
• Anti-Grinding:
  • Once a map has been played, subsequent playthroughs will award only half as much seasonal and profile EXP until the game does its daily reset at midnight UTC.
  • In custom maps, source tiles have a finite number of resources that can be mined from them, preventing the player from just abusing low-difficulty custom maps to easily reap tons of resources.
• Art Evolution: Many of the tower are now slightly brighter and have different shading, plus the roads are no longer rocky.
• Asteroids Monster: Fighter enemies split into three copies of themselves with 50% health after being killed.
• Black Blood: Enemies leave small blood splatters on the ground when they are killed which are based on their color (like green for Regular enemies, blue for Armored enemies, etc.), though the coloration combined with the fact that enemies are colored shapes lets the game stay family friendly.
• Boss Rush: Level 5.8 spawns a previously defeated boss every 20th wave and ends on wave 100 with an entirely new boss, Metaphor. Custom level portals are also this by default if a boss control tile is not placed in the level, spawning a boss every 20 waves.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: The player can purchase a pass that doubles certain kinds of rewards, and exclusively on the smartphone versions, they can also purchase packages of resources (although they can be carried over to the Steam version if one makes the purchase on a smartphone first, then uses a game account to sync purchased goods). That said, the developers have made it a point that these are entirely optional, as none of these in-app purchases contain anything that the player can't get by playing the game. Since 2023, due to the inability of players in Russia to make in-app purchases for the game as a result of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war (the developers are based in Ukraine, notably), they are instead shown ads between game sessions.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Level rumble, unlocked after beating level 5.8. It disables all towers other than Basic and Sniper and has you unlock them as the level progresses. All enemies can also walk on tower platforms and are very tough.
• Cap: The score cap is 2,147M, or 2^31-1.
• Cold Flames: The Cold Fire ability lets a Flamethrower tower spew them, as they will slow enemies down by 25% and not ignite them, also causing them to not lose the freezing effect from a Freezing tower.
• Contractual Boss Immunity: Most bosses are immune to Sniper towers' Killshot ability.
• Coup de Grâce: The Killshot perk lets Sniper towers instantly kill non-boss enemies with <34% HP after every 4 kills.
• Crutch Character: Basic towers can carry you through the early game, but as other tower types start to catch up in terms of capabilities and new types of towers are introduced, their effectiveness starts to taper off, especially from Level 3.1 onwards.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: You can play on easy mode that makes enemies weaker, but it reduces prizes for each game and disables the research tree as well as leaderboards.
• Endless Game: As before, the whole point of the game is that the levels don't end unless you run out of lives or quit. However, the bonus levels do actually end once you defeat a certain wave of enemies.
• Evolving Title Screen: The title screen displays trophies you've earned from stages, with it becoming more robust the more you earn.
• Exposition Fairy: Advinas, who typically explains the abilities of new towers or bosses.
• Flash of Pain: Enemies flash white for a split-second after getting hit, though the effect is subdued and their outlines stay just about the same.
• Flunky Boss: Constructor, the boss faced in 3.8, spawns enemies as long as it's active on the field every 5 seconds and when it drops to 75%, 50%, and 25% HP. The foe types spawned are usually Regular, Fast, and Strong, but other enemies from the level's portal can also appear (other than Healer).
• Geo Effects: As before, the are tiles that boost a tower's stats if placed on them, with several new ones that affect money gained, experience gained, and money returned when selling the tower.
• Hard Mode Perks: You can play on endless mode that makes enemies stronger and lets them walk on vacant platforms, but it lets you use an endless research tree with new nodes and which has higher level cap for the existing nodes, increases prizes for each game, and makes enemies drop special loot. An Endless-exclusive Research node allows the player to amp the difficulty even further for better loot and scores, if the player can handle the boosted enemy stats.
• Injured Vulnerability:
  • Freezing towers apply a "frozen" debuff that, in addition to slowing afflicted enemies down, extends the duration of poison effects and lengthens lightning chains (from Tesla towers).
  • Burning enemies take extra damage from Flamethrower towers that have the Cold Fire ability.
  • The Cannon tower's Mental Pressure ability inflicts extra damage to enemies who are under a particular percentage of HP (the threshold can be increased through the Research tree).
• Interactive Start Up: You can spin the hexagonal grid with trophies on the title screen around or change the angle from which you're looking at it.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: The game itself does not take too much time to load, but continuing a saved game can take more than a minute as the game has to load each frame that took place during it individually. Luckily, version 1.8 made it possible to load a game instantly.
• Loot Boxes: You can get or buy treasure chests with random resources for Research. They usually have to be decrypted which takes up an hour or several depending on their rarity before they can be opened.
• Long-Range Fighter:
  • Snipers excel at burst damage, especially to much-bothersome Strong enemies, but lose charge-up speed if enemies are on adjacent tiles.
  • Missile towers shoot powerful burst-damage missiles, and can even fire special Long-Range Missiles that are outside of the tower's targeting area...which notably excludes a radius of slightly over one tile closest to the tower, meaning they will not target enemies in that space.
• Macross Missile Massacre: One of the level 4/7 abilities for the Missile Tower, Compact Missiles, makes it fire three missiles at once instead of one, each dealing the fraction of the damage of a regular missile but which can do more damage than a regular missile if all three missiles impact the same target. An Endless-exclusive Research upgrade allows it to fire more missiles per volley.
• Mechanically Unusual Fighter: The Gauss tower is the only one that can be aimed manually, due to its unique mechanic of gathering resources from adjacent miners to fire a powerful shot.
• Mighty Glacier: In Level 6.3, you fight a special version of Stakey that moves absurdly slowly, but whose segments are far more durable than the boss's other incarnations.
• Mook Medic: Healer enemies will heal nearby mooks for 5% of their max health per second.
• No Fair Cheating: To prevent cheated scores on the leaderboards, a validation server receives a full account of all player actions taken during a game, and completely replays each game submitted, skipping any impossible/invalid actions, to assign the score.
• Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: You can earn trophies for reaching final wave milestones on certain levels. Each trophy boosts a stat permanently by a bit.
• The Paralyzer: The Final Boss Metaphor disables any towers adjacent to it, with those towers becoming unusable until Metaphor pulls away. Furthermore, every 25% of its HP that it loses, the two strongest towers on the map get disabled, until the boss is destroyed.
• Power-Up Letdown:
  • The Minigun has the Hot Bullet ability, which causes enemies it targets to get inflicted with the Burn debuff, so it takes even more damage. However, Burn effect overrides the much more useful Freeze (slow enemy movement) effect. The slight increase is damage doesn't justify losing the slowdown. The Foundation upgrade changes Hot Bullets to a poison effect instead, allowing the tower to not anti-synergize against Freezing towers.
  • Laser is a tower that shoots a laser in a straight line, heavily damaging all enemies the laser hits. However, its upgrades disagree with its function.
    • High-frequency Laser upgrade triples the laser damage, but makes the laser only capable of hitting a single enemy. Considering a well-placed Laser will certainly hit more than three enemy, this is an overall decrease in damage. It's only useful against bosses, which are rare, and are better dealt with using Snipers.
    • Mirror System halves the laser's damage, but shoots three lasers instead of one. Theoretically this improves its total damage, except that the other two lasers are fired at such awkward angles they more often than not end up hitting nothing.
• Pinball Scoring: Due to the point counts growing rather quickly as the waves progress, it's possible to earn tens of millions of them on some of the later levels, and even the early levels will typically let you exceed one million.
• Prolonged Video Game Sequel: The original game has 18 levels with a hardcore mode for all of them. The sequel has 40 story levels and 5 bonus ones, with each one also playable on the harder endless mode, with dozens of sidequests for almost every one of them, and several other levels outside of it.
• Randomly Generated Quests: There's a daily quest system where the game makes you do an easy task on one of several pre-made levels for a reward, though you can also try to claim a high score to earn addditional rewards depending on the percentage of players you land in. It also has a daily loot system where the game makes you do a random side quest which is available normally at any time (as many levels have quite a few side quests, the game just picks one of them) but with an additional reward.
• Scientific and Technological Theme Naming: The minable resources are named after algebraic objects: Scalar^note a numerical magnitude with no specific direction, Vector^note a magnitude and a direction, Matrix^note a retangular array of values, Tensor^note a system of vectors, and Infiar; although Infiars are fictitious.
• Score Multiplier: Score earned is affected by the difficulty of the portal, every 1% reduced reduces score by 1% and every 1% added adds to score by 0.25% (for example, 75% difficulty = 0.75 score, 100% = 1.00, 300% = 1.5).
• Scoring Points: You earn points based on every individual enemy killed (varies by wave), calling waves early (50 * number of bonus coins above wave timer), killing all enemies before a wave ends (50/wave at level 1, with that value increasing every 10 waves), mining resources (40-80 for each, depending on rarity), and 10% of all coins gained (only added at the end of the level). The main purpose of points is the leaderboard and quests sometimes requiring you to reach a certain amount in one game or over multiple games.
• Secret Level: If you spam click Debug Mode in the options, you end up in a level called "zecred". It has enemies walking on tiles you'd built your towers on, enemies themselves have emojis as faces, you get a lot of cash to start with but only one life and one as the max upgrade level, and other weird stuff.
• Self-Recovery Surprise: Broot, the boss of Level 1.8, goes into a tempirary damage absorption state when it has 25% HP remaining, meaning that the player should turn off their towers until the absorption effect wears off...or they can ignore the effect and blast its full HP away again if their damage output is high enough, since Broot only activates its absorption state once.
• Shed Armor, Gain Speed: Stakey, the boss of Level 2.8, is a Segmented Serpent whose middle segments provide shielding to its head. Destroying the segments weakens the head shield, but it also gets faster. With none of its segments left, it moves even faster than Fast enemies.
• Skill Scores and Perks: The skill tree from the previous game is back, though now research levels are placed. For example, upgrading Basic towers' damage is no longer several skill nodes, but one skill that can get more upgrade levels.
• Sound Test: There's a music player feature in which you can listen to all tracks from levels as long as they aren't locked.
• Support Party Member:
  • On the player side, Modifiers, which don't attack but boost stats of up to 8 towers surrounding them.
  • On the enemy side, Armored enemies, who block 50% of damage taken by other enemies when in close proximity.
  • Also on the enemy side, Healer enemies, who heal 5% of damaged enemies' max health per second if they're close enough.
• Timed Mission: Endless difficulty puts scoring on a 45-minute timer for each session. Once the timer expires, you can keep playing but you will not earn any more points.
• Unlockable Difficulty Levels: Endless mode (which is basically hard mode) has to be unlocked by completing all story levels.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: The Flamethrower tower. Its basic attack gives enemies the Burn status, which heavily damages enemies over time. But Burn overrides the more useful Freeze effect, making the tower basically unusable. There's the Cold Fire upgrade, which lets the Flamethrower not inflict Burn. Unfortunately, a majority of the Flamethrower's damage come from the effect, so its damage is completely gutted. To add insult to injury, Healer enemies are completely immune to its attacks.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Stakey, the boss of Level 2.8. Whereas Broot is merely a slow Damage-Sponge Boss, Stakey requires more strategy to defeat. It's a Segmented Serpent whose segments provide defense to its head, thus the player needs to change their towers' behavior away from the default "target the frontmost enemy" pattern and use towers that can hit multiple targets at once. However, as Stakey loses segments and thus defense, it also gets faster, and if the player destroys too many of the segments, they may not have enough time to defeat it before it slithers into the base for an instant "Base is full".
• Warm-Up Boss: Broot, the boss faced in 1.8. As the game mentions, it is slow, heavy and simple. It shouldn't be difficult to win if you've placed several well-upgraded towers.