Bean Beasts: The Ultimate Tower Defense Trainwreck You Can’t Unsee

Hello everyone. Today we’re talking about Bean Beasts, a tower defense game that clearly decided that bland garden plants weren’t pulling in the numbers, so they slapped googly eyes on beans and said, “Congratulations, you’ve evolved.” Yes, it’s the video game equivalent of putting sunglasses on a potato and calling it a mascot. Let’s rip this open, shall we?

Gameplay: Tower Defense, But With Beans

So here’s the pitch: you get 10 unique Bean Beasts. Each one of these bean-shaped critters evolves three times, which makes them sound less like defenders of humanity and more like Pokémon that skipped leg day forever. They gain experience, unlock secondary attacks, and have special abilities. On paper, it sounds like a solid evolution system. In execution, though, this screams of “add three evolution stages because the spreadsheet looked too sparse.” I’m calling it now: two of the stages will feel meaningful, and one will be the equivalent of adding eyebrows and pretending it’s a radical change.

You’ve got traps, 12 of them apparently, with branching upgrade paths. You’ve got walls to redirect enemies. And of course, you’ve got the always exciting “use physics and gravity to shove opponents.” Wonderful. Nothing makes me feel more like a tactical genius than bullying virtual blobs of enemies down a ravine. Half the fun will likely be laughing as physics bugs yeet enemies into the void against the will of the designers.

Features Overload

Here’s the problem, my dear bean-loving friends: this feature list is screaming at the top of its lungs, trying very hard to impress. And like the freshman who lists every extracurricular to cover for lack of talent, Bean Beasts might collapse under its own bullet points.

• 10 unique Bean Beasts with 3 stages each.
• 12 reusable traps with upgrade paths.
• 21 individual player-triggered abilities. Yes, 21. Because nothing says fun like more hotkeys than a flight simulator.
• 40 handcrafted levels, spanning 5 biomes. Translation: one forest, one desert, some ice, token lava stage, and “mystical otherworld” to check boxes.
• 8 endless maps. Because once you’ve suffered enough, why not keep suffering?
• Over 50 enemy types. Meaning: 20 reskins, 20 slightly stronger versions, and 10 actual uniques. If we’re optimistic.

There’s a difference between depth and bloat, and this game feels like it’s walking a very fine line. Much like a patient who insists on listing every symptom they’ve had since middle school, not all of this information is actually useful, and some of it actively makes treatment (or in this case, enjoyment) harder.

Boss Encounters: Eight Big Bean Baddies

We’re told there are 8 “epic” boss encounters. Epic in what sense? Epic compared to your standard bean-sized minion? Epic like trying to make canned chili feel gourmet? Without seeing it in practice, my very jaded expectation is that bosses will mostly be giant, HP-sponge versions of regular enemies that occasionally fart out adds. Hopefully I’m wrong, but let’s not pretend that tower defense bosses have historically been the stuff of gaming legend.

System Requirements: Beans for Everyone

Good news – unless you’re running your PC on hamster wheels, Bean Beasts is basically playable on anything that can boot Windows 7. The system requirements are laughably light, which means there’s no excuse for bad optimization, and yet I can already hear the chorus of “but Unity” in the background. Mac players are somewhat less lucky, needing updated macOS versions, but let’s be honest – most tower defense games don’t exactly demand GPU overdrive.

Design & Aesthetics

The marketing proudly notes “custom music, artwork and juicy sound effects.” Juicy. That’s the word. Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard a bean that sounded “juicy” without immediately deciding to cancel my lunch plans. But hey, maybe the devs know something we don’t, like ASMR for legumes. On the bright side, original music and effort in art are always appreciated, and in an indie space oversaturated with asset-flip garbage, at least they bothered to cook their beans from scratch.

Conspiracy Corner: Beans and the Shadow Government

Let’s pause for the conspiracy angle here. We’ve got beans evolving, beans forming societies, beans wielding elemental damage, beans with gravity manipulation – do you see what I see? Clearly this is subliminal propaganda preparing us for the eventual uprising of sentient legumes. When we’re all forced to choose between worshiping the Great Pinto or defying the Garbanzo Conclave, you’ll remember where you first heard it.

Final Thoughts

Bean Beasts is shaping up to be the kind of game that throws everything at the wall and hopes that at least half of it sticks. Tower defense is a brutal genre where precision and elegance matter far more than feature vomit. There are promising bits here: meaningful evolution, clever trap design, and lots of enemy variety could make for interesting gameplay. But overloaded abilities, questionable boss design, and what appears to be a fetish for beans may sink the whole thing under its own weight.

If you love tower defense and don’t mind a little silliness with your strategy, this might land in your “worth a look” pile. But if you prefer clean design, balance, and focus, maybe hold out for something less… starchy.

Overall impression? Cautiously negative. The premise is amusing, the execution seems overloaded, and unless the devs demonstrate restraint, this bean stew is more likely to give you indigestion than satisfaction.

Article source: Bean Beasts