It suffered from a lack of player testing. The pacing is terrible on this one, and the earlier ones, and this doesn't have the cool factor the earlier ones did, where you were fighting enemies.
Tower defence games are easy to make, and there are huge numbers of them. There's nothing about them that makes them especially good, there are just so many that a lot happen to be good. Play the odds enough, and you'll win.
Saying that though, your game lacks the features of the best tower defence games- extremely varied towers, fast gameplay, natural obstacles.
<a href="http://www.towerdefence.net/?page=allgames&ls=top10">http://www.towerdefence.net/?page=all games&ls=top10</a>
Play a few of these and you'll see what the top of the line tower defences are like. Your space shooter did do incredibly, because it had amazing replayability, and was incredible fun. If you had just tweaked and upgraded that, and further improved the replayability you would have a functional and incredibly well selling game.
This... it just lacks anything that makes me want to play it. There's no sense of desperation, no sense of danger, predictable upgrades, limited point in placement of towers, extreme ease. Your mistake was not doing market research on why tower defence games become popular.
BlankShadowz
I liked Ether, but I honestly didn't like the direction you took with this new game. I didn't feel like I played it enough to give it an honest review, sorry, but I felt like I should be telling you on your page from the heart to stick to more traditional means of TD, with more customization and just more towers.
While the enemies were fun, they didn't seem to have the 'UMPH!' that I was feeling the new Ether game could've gone for... Don't get me wrong, I loved Ether Wars; it was my favorite Flash game for a long time, and it's still one of my favorites. But this TD, and how everything was "circular," instead of drawn up in the usual boxes and diagrams, while innovative and pretty - and fun - wasn't direct enough to fit my taste.
Definitely, customization seemed to be in the gray area of Lacking, and I would've liked to at least have you pronounce something like a Tier system, at least, in the 4 towers available. Not that the upgrades weren't great and tough to decide on, just that everything seems to push you in the path of one kind of tower no matter where you decide to go with the scheme of placement (which has a very wide range of possibilities, referring to the "circular" topic), and it felt forced. Great Flash game, but it doesn't deserve a perfect score from me; sorry. And I accept your apology for no multiplayer!
Damn I really could've written that in a review...
Kajenx
Haha, thanks mang! I really appreciate the honesty. I had a horrible time selling this, and I know it's anecdotal at this point, but I don't think the score are gonna be so hot. So, I'm thinking people will be agreeing with you.
The real irony of the situation was that I tried harder to make a good design on this game than I think I ever have in the past. My other ether games sold well, but they did very poorly in terms of performance, so I was trying to take this in a direction that would perform better. If I end up doing another one, I'm going to have to really think about how to do it...