App Army Assemble: Outhold - "Is tower defence alive and well in 2026??"

Outhold is an incremental tower defence with a minimalist art style that was recently released for mobile. It's the incremental part that intrigued us, bringing a different wrinkle to the genre's usual formula. How would it hold up? We handed it over to our App Army readers to find out.

Here's what they said:

Outhold can be best described as a strategic minimalist tower defence game. While that’s a bit wordy, it really defines just what you’ll experience in Outhold. Taking into account your familiarity with the countless games in this popular genre, you’ll feel right at home once you start putting everything together. While the game starts out a bit slow without any real hand-holding, once you grasp the concept of equipping your initial tower and earning coins, Outhold begins to wonderfully open up as you unlock an upgrade tree that seems to grow bigger and bigger with each run.

While you’ll no doubt fail early and often, the losses force you to learn from your mistakes and weaknesses strategically, and you’ll incrementally build stronger and smarter from map to map. Outhold strips away all the fillers of traditional tower defence games, leaving us with the bare minimum, and it comes away even better for it. Highly recommended!

It starts off really simple and minimal. In fact, the app icon looks nothing like a game icon. Anyway, you will lose a lot of times, and each time you lose, you can collect upgrade points. The fun of this game is playing to lose, then upgrading various things. The skill tree is massive.

It plays like a tower defence. Work out the best position to place your weapons. Upgrade in-game or place another type in another place. At first, you will lose, then you get the upgrade to allow you to start with more coins, or enemies drop more coins. Before you know it, you will be upgrading all things within a game run. Suddenly, the game has a multitude of options, the upgrade skill tree path is compelling by itself. The best part for me is working out the best positions for my turrets, and of course, defeating the level boss. I really recommend this one.

Great game design and very simple, minimalistic graphics. This game is a gem. Well, I really want everyone to try this game.

Outhold managed to surprise me even after all these years of gaming. I went in expecting a minimalist tower defence game with upgrades. Seeing a big spider web on an upgraded tree certainly piqued my interest.

What I didn’t expect was the level format; you play a level and see how far you can make it. Earn upgrade points, then return to the same level with more upgrades and maybe a change of strategy. You replay each level over and over until you beat it; there’s no punishment for losing, and you feel like you are always progressing thanks to its meta progression.

I can easily recommend the game to anyone interested, and don’t let the minimalist look fool you, it’s no walk in the park. Plus, as an added bonus, with it being a premium title, you can reset your skill tree/meta upgrades whenever you want, completely free and try something else.

Outhold is a tower defence game that lets you progress by building sets after each game session (not level). You can use in-game currency to improve your blocks' types, their damage, health, critical damage, unlock attack styles, and many other stats. The game lets you try again and again, but you'll get used to it because it's part of the progression. 

The Most fun part is the game lets you use different build sets, which lets you play the same level in different ways, and surprisingly, you get all the in-game currency you've unlocked in other slots too, despite using them in other slots, giving you complete freedom to build. There are three types of goals, too: finishing in a certain amount of time, without damaging your build, taking a certain amount of damage, or taking a certain type of damage, which gives you a few more reasons to play the same level. The art style is simple, which I like.

Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on

I was expecting an idle incremental, but I got a tower defence puzzler incremental. The gameplay loop is simple: spend resources to unlock/upgrade nodes in a huge ability tree, then place and upgrade towers on the map, kill attackers to get resources, die, rage against the game and yourself, then (usually after upgrading the tree a few times) finally survive all the attacking waves. There are ten minimalistic and very simple-looking maps (with hidden strategic complexity), a huge ability tree (that you'll need to rearrange to fit the various challenges you get), and four different game modes. 

Beat all 30 regular challenges to unlock endless mode, prestige (stronger attackers), and token limit (ability tree shenanigans). It took me around 4 hours to unlock everything and reach 70%, but puzzles get harder and harder, so the final 30% will definitely take longer. Don't expect to grind your way to 100% - you can't unlock and upgrade everything in the ability tree simply by replaying previous maps (although replaying helps). You need to solve the new puzzles / beat the new game modes, because some of the nodes won't unlock otherwise. All in all, if you enjoy both tower defense AND puzzles, you'll love this.

I’m a big fan of tower defence games and was kind of surprised at the minimalist design of this. But the real beauty is in the upgrade system. Every time you play, you earn in-game currency that lets you choose upgrades to go back and try again. And again, until you survive the fifth wave. The first time I did, it came after two or three failures, so surviving that first level was very satisfying. Then you take on the next level/map. There are multiple upgrade paths you can take that help you on different levels, and there are plenty of levels to work through. Minimalist appearance, but more and more tactical choices available as you work your way up. MinMax Software has a winner here, and I enthusiastically recommend it. Two big thumbs up.

Outhold is an incremental tower defence, where you get different currencies by defeating enemies and clearing levels, which you can then use to upgrade a massive skill tree, unlocking new towers, or getting upgrades for your current ones. I really liked how permissive the skill tree is, as you can freely refund your spent currency to try other things.

The gameplay loop is compelling. I found myself many times thinking, just one more time, if I rearrange my tree, I can beat this level. And then, going back to previous levels to get the two challenges that each level has. If you like tower defence games, do yourself a favour and get this game.

The App Army is Pocket Gamer's lovely community of mobile game experts. As often as possible, we ask them for their thoughts on the latest games and share them with you.

To join, simply head over to either our Discord Channel or Facebook Group and request access by answering the three questions. We'll then get you in right away.

Download now!

Outhold