Tower defense is a subgenre of strategy games where the main mission is to defend a territory against waves of enemies by building structures. Due to its simple nature, the genre has been wildly popular with both casual and hardcore players alike. In this article, we are going to showcase the best tower defense games for PC in 2021.

The tower defense games on mobile are also pretty popular as well.

1. Defense Grid: The Awakening

Almost 10 years have passed since the release of the original Defense Grid, but no game has managed to top it yet. In this game, players have to defend their base from a horde of enemies and prevent them from stealing the base's power cores.
In tower defense games, having your towers focusing on an enemy is key.

The best part of DG is probably its high replayability. There are 20 unique levels, each with a different placement of roads, tower build locations, and open areas. You will need to mix and match your 10 different tower types to deal with 15 different enemies types.

2. Orcs Must Die! 2

Orcs Must Die! is a series that mixes third-person shooter, melee, and magic combat with fantasy-based tower defense, creating a unique combination of strategy and action gameplay. You need to use all weapons in your arsenal to defend the base from the orc hordes.
Orcs Must Die! 2 is a crazy blend between traps, dungeons and 3rd person combat.

The best part about Orcs Must Die! is that all its "towers" are traps designed to damage, delay, and displace enemies. Environment plays a big role as well. For example, instead of just setting a trap that pushes enemies back on the middle of the road, players can place that near a cliff so that enemies would be pushed off it.

3. Plants vs Zombies

Plants vs Zombies took the formula of tower defense and simplified it to a smaller, minigame size. There is no long path to defend: the zombies come from the right while the players defend from the left.

Plants vs Zombies is one of the most iconic tower defense games on PC.

However, despite its simplicity, Plants vs Zombies's formula just works, with new elements getting added gradually. More powerful zombies are introduced, alongside numerous new plants, minigames and mechanics for players to deal with. Since release, it has become a classics, with multiple sequels released on mobile.

4. Bloon TD 6

Unlike other tower defense games that expand from PC to mobile, Bloon TD did the opposite: it was originally one of the highest rated strategy games on mobile. In Bloon TD 6, players defense a village by spawning and upgrading an army of monkeys, with each having a unique weapon.

Despite its graphics being pretty underwhelming, Bloon TD6 has a lot of depth.

Replayability wise, Bloon TD 6 is amongst the biggest games on this list, with a 57 maps roster currently in the game. Each map's difficulty can be tuned up and players can also select various challenge modes to fine-tune their gameplay experience.

5. Anomaly: Warzone Earth

Anomaly: Warzone Earth is a complete reversal of the usual tower defense formula. Instead of building towers to defend, players control a horde of units to try to sneak past enemies' defense instead.

Anomaly: Warzone Earth is one of the few reverse tower defense games.

In this game, players have to fight their way through an alien controlled landscape. Their task is to keep their limited units healthy and upgrade them whenever possible, all in order to get through the next objective.

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