Wild Ice takes the tower defense player off the bench

The setup is that the world froze and never stopped. Anyone who freezes comes back as a frost zombie, drawn to whatever warmth is left, and the last warmth in the town of Coldwater is a scattered network of experimental furnaces. Switching one on is the only way to push the cold back. It is also the dinner bell.

So the verb list is unusual. You cross a frozen open world looking for the next furnace, start it, then build and upgrade hockey-themed traps around it, fortify the choke points and funnel the horde into them. When something gets through — and things get through — you answer it yourself with a slap shot, a slash or a body check. You play as Max the scavenger or Finley the tank, solo or in splitscreen co-op, and the two have different perks rather than different skins.

The part worth pointing at is that there is no spectator phase. Most tower defense splits time cleanly in half: a build phase where you have all the agency, and a wave where your job is to watch your own plan work and click one button if it does not. The plan is the player, and the player is a cursor. Wild Ice keeps the planning and then puts you on the ice inside your own layout, which means a leak is not a number going down somewhere, it is a thing skating at you that you have to hit.

Everything around that is built for repetition rather than length. Every furnace is scored, so a run at one can be replayed for a better line. Difficulty runs from Rookie to Veteran, gear and character mods change how the two of them play, and the map hangs side quests, items and hidden crows off the route between objectives.

How To Combine Video Game Genres is the essay this game lives or dies by. Its argument is that a mash-up does not work because you poured two genres into one build — it works when each genre has a job, and both jobs point at the same focus. Here the focus is the furnace: the open world supplies the reason to travel and the gear you travel for, the tower defense supplies the siege, and the melee covers what the traps miss. The failure mode is the one that essay warns about, where one half quietly becomes the chore you do between rounds of the other.

How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves explains the risk in the pitch. Given a safe, reliable route to victory, players take it even when that route flattens the game — and in a tower defense with a character in it, the safe route is obvious: build the perfect maze, stand behind it, and never swing the stick. “No sitting on the bench” is a promise the systems have to keep, not a line of marketing. The traps have to leak on purpose, and the scoring has to pay better for the aggressive play than for the tidy one.

What to build first in an open world covers the half of the runtime nobody pitches. Its point is that the first thing to get right is a hundred metres of ground you enjoy crossing, because everything else in an open world sits on top of that. A game about hockey players on a frozen planet starts with an advantage most survival games do not have — skating is already a movement system, with glide, weight and turns that punish commitment. If crossing the ice is good, the map can afford to be quiet between furnaces. If it is not, every side quest is a walk.

Wild Ice is by Journey Bound Games, self-published, out now on Windows, filed under Action, Indie and Strategy. It runs single-player or as shared-screen co-op, with full controller support, Steam achievements, adjustable difficulty and adjustable text size.

The shape is furnace to furnace rather than one endless siege, and each one is scored on its own. That makes it a campaign of scored set pieces wrapped in a world, which is a much better fit for a couch co-op evening than a survival mode that only ends when you lose.

If the interesting bit is treating a zombie horde as a positioning problem instead of a shooting gallery, Undead Chronicles is the other one on this list — it slows the undead right down and strips the HUD, so the whole game becomes geometry. Wild Ice arrives at the same place from the other direction, by letting you build the geometry first.