Bean Beasts Review – Review
A pixelated tower defense with staying power.
The titular bean beasts feel like only one piece of the puzzle that makes their game so darn enjoyable. I wasn’t expecting tower defense when I first saw the title, but I’m glad I took a second look and gave it a chance because Bean Beasts reminds me of just how addicting the genre can be. Fun progression, strategic gameplay, and a stout challenge culminate in an experience that will entice veterans and newcomers alike.
A handful of cutscenes portray a lizard on a boat exploring new lands before finding the island where Bean Beasts take place. Across a total of 40 stages, you encounter a variety of enemies, environments, and obstacles that require their own strategies to overcome. There’s a bit of an initial learning curve as you figure out how your bean beasts, traps, and special abilities work, but after getting through a handful of stages, you’ll have a solid foundation of the game’s mechanics and all the choices you can make to survive and even thrive.
Three initial difficulty settings and a fourth unlockable one allow players to customize the experience to their liking, but the harder you go, the more gems you can earn and then spend opening up new perks, weapons, and characters from the main menu’s shop. Each stage also has two side objectives, like not allowing your main character–a lizard riding your choice of mount–to take damage, or using cannons to shove a set number of enemies into an open pit. The layout of paths, pits, trees, and other features changes noticeably with every new level, which means that you will want to change up your (initially limited) arsenal before giving it a go.
At the start of each stage, you have an unlimited amount of time to spend your meager starting resources on setting up your defense. Energy can be spent to deploy weapons like crossbows and swords or traps like spike pits and barrier-forming boxes; you earn more energy with every enemy you take down in the wave. Beans are used to deploy and upgrade bean beasts, and you typically earn one bean per round. At certain moments, your lizard hero will shout a battle cry that immediately bestows multiple beans and hundreds of points of energy, and this is typically a signal that a difficult wave of foes is on the way.
Before each wave of enemies emerges, arrow indicators show their exact path to your “tower,” which allows you to plan your defense effectively, at least some of the time. What you can’t always plan for are enemies that will destroy your boxes, instead of going around them, or swift enemies that will zoom past your slow-firing cannons. Certain waves will contain powerful “nemesis” creatures that pose a very real threat to the mounted lizard and its health counter, so you’ll want to save abilities like the lizard’s rain of arrows, your mount’s earthquake-producing stomp, or the earth-type bean beast’s spike cannon for particularly dire moments. Speaking of, the final stage in each area involves a boss fight that truly tests your tower defense mettle, and I always looked forward to these and even tried them out with different setups to see what worked best.
Tower defense as a genre hasn’t really grabbed my attention as a Switch user, but Bean Beasts has made me think I need to pay more attention for potential hidden gems like this one. The steady drip feed of unlockables means there’s always something new to try, especially if your tried-and-true tactics don’t work on a particular stage, and the initial learning curve quickly gives way to a satisfying challenge that ebbs and flows across the various biomes, boss fights, and special levels with an endless number of enemies. Frequent but short loading screens are a minor nuisance, but they’re worth the price of admission for this incredible entry in the tower defense pantheon. The name might not do it any favors, but don’t judge these Bean Beasts by their cover. There’s plenty of tasty meat on these bones.
