Protolife

Protolife is a unique tower-based strategy game in which you take direct control of a builder robot in a struggle against a hungry proto-life organism. Fifteen years after colonists landed on Gagarin-5 and worked to make it home, corruption spread across the land in mere days: crimson waves washed away the mushroom farms and giant worms devoured the cities. Only a few thousand people escaped into emergency bases, and a small opening to fight back and clean the planet is their only chance.

You defend a distant human colony against a growing lifeform that devours everything in its wake. The standout idea is the building process: every tower is constructed from patterns of simple blocks, so you build your defense grid piece by piece, upgrading, combining and optimizing space and resources to survive overwhelming odds. The enemy is unlike usual RTS adversaries, a living entity that exploits every weakness and grows more powerful the more ground it takes.

The game gives you freedom of strategy and a flexible defense perimeter: rush low-tier towers, bunker down with artillery posts, or collect your blocks and rebuild on the spot. You can dynamically switch between several battlefronts, even controlling more than one builder. It includes over 30 levels with varied objectives, a random mission generator with adjustable difficulty, and a custom tower editor for building your own weapons. The game was designed for keyboard or gamepad rather than mouse.