Defender's Quest is the only one I've played, but it's awesome, so that gets my vote anyway.

Then again, I'm a sucker for any game with RPG elements.

Well I just beat DQ. Not new game plus, mind you, and there's still a fight (or three?) where the endgame branches. I also didn't realize how to get these books until after I did the end game.

It's not a bad game but I think the RPG elements made it inevitable that the game suffers from a lack of strategic depth. Well, you can lack that without RPG elements too. But when the player can have an unknown assortment of units with an unknown allocation of skill points and an unknown experience level, it becomes practically impossible to craft levels with the subtle attention to detail and balance you need to create a puzzle-like challenge where the player wins by figuring out an elaborate strategy that exploits the given resources in a synergizing combination. That's the kind of thing I'd like to see.. otherwise the gameplay is what the genre is known for -- shallow and repetitive. That is how it felt.

It is quite rare for me to play games to the end, by the way. Well done DQ.

Thanks for the recommendations, folk! I think I'll consider kingdom rush next?

The Kingdom Rush series is pretty good but I would recommend to try Sang Froid first.

The game is quite different than typical tower defense games because ...

*) ...of the different kind of traps (e.g.: One trap deals a decent amount of damage to many but only triggers when many step on it at the same time, so it's only useful against groups. Another trap deals a high fixed amount of damage either to one opponent or distributes its fixed damage among many opponent so it's useful against strong opponents as well as against groups of weaker enemies, but has to be triggered manually. Another trap only does slight damage but also delays the opponent. Another trap does no damage at all but changes the enemies routes. etc.)

*) ... you have one planning stage during which you set the traps, improve your character and equipment and one action stage when you actually have to fight alongside your traps. You are no fighter though and can only take on some opponents which your traps missed. Don't forget to manually trigger traps which require it at the right moment though!

*)... the game constantly throws new mechanics at you. At the beginning wolves will only attack you when they see you. Later they can also hear you when you do something loud (e.g. shoot your rifle or use the shout skill to temporarily scare off some wolves if you are attacked by too many at once) or smell you when the wind blows in the right direction. You can use that to your advantage though to lure them off their lane and right into a trap.

That there are constantly new enemies who have different resistances or even immunities to some kind of traps is pretty normal for the genre so it's hardly worth mentioning. :-)

I can assure you the game is anything but shallow and repetitive and it's free to boot so why not give it a try?

It sounded interesting enough so I tried it just now. Unfortunately I ran into too many technical issues and soon enough the game froze just like it did for this person in 2015.. https://www.gog.com/forum/sangfroid_tales_of_werwolves/game_freezes_during_tutorial

I haven't played the game in a while so I just installed it and it worked just fine for me.

The screenshot in the link shows the frame in which the tutorial movies play but the movie isn't playing. That would most likely be a codec issue. So either a codec is missing (unlikely since most games use codecs that come with the OS or install missing codecs themselves) or you have an old buggy codec installed that tries to take over the decoding of the movie and fails.

Have you installed any third party codec packs, or media editing, conversion or player software? These are the most likely culprits for installing deprecated codecs. If the answer is yes you should try to uninstall these. You could also try to update your codecs, that might help as well.

Or you could try to install codecs that are regularly maintained and debugged like the latest LAV-Filters (github.com/Nevcairiel/LAVFilters/releases). Installing these alone might help but sometimes buggy codecs really love to push themselves in front of others and uninstalling the software they came with is necessary.

As far as I know GOG supports all their products, even the free ones. If you can't find out which codec is at fault GOG support might be able to help you.

It would really be a shame if you can't get the game to run.