Plants vs Zombies vs Rise to Ruins
Plants vs Zombies
Plants vs Zombies is a whimsical tower defense game that places you in a unique position, mainly by planting a wide variety of plants on your lawn, to counter the advancing horde of zombies that are about to invade your home. You'll gradually expand your troop of potted plants as you progress to increasingly challenging levels and you'll need to adapt to the game as its situation changes, such as defending against the horde on your roof or at night. The coins you've earned from playing levels can then be spent at Crazy Dave's shop which he ran from the back of his van. There's even a mini-game of sorts where you can plant and harvest a variety of items, including coins, in your own garden.Proclaimed as being one of the modern classic tower defense games, Plants vs Zombies (PvZ) set a high bar for other similar TD games to follow and from what we can see, only a handful (Kingdom Rush, for example) managed to make it to a similar level of popularity as PvZ has enjoyed. PopCap Games has even followed up PvZ's huge success with exciting sequels (only on mobile though) and equally-entertaining spin-offs, like the PvZ: Garden Warefare game which diversified the entire franchise by delving into the competitive shooter genre.
Rise to Ruins
Rise to Ruins is a godlike empire-building strategy game that incorporates some elements of tower defense (during night time). Inspired by games like Towns, Gnomoria, Banished and Dwarf Fortress, you will need to build a thriving empire, recruit new nomads to join you, manage your empire's resources, and ensure that your people are content in this game. During the night, however, enemies will start hammering at your gates, and as such, set up proper tower-defense-like defenses to funnel your enemies into easily manageable "slaughter zones" as well as appoint guards to patrol your empire's parameters.There are also tons of fun little features that made this game so engaging to play, including your special godlike powers which you can use to help your little people survive or to cause them a huge amount of distress, and how the creatures and people in the game react to the presence of godly powers. You can even completely change the landscape of a map if you wish. The game has a ton of maps and game modes, even in its early access form, for you to play around with as well!
Rise to Ruins is still a work in progress but the game seems almost completely done and ready for launch. So, although it's still technically in early access, you can rest assured that the game is in its playable stage of development - you can immediately dive right in after purchasing the game!
P/S: There's also a trick that you can use to stop enemies from proliferating at all on the map you play on if you fancy a peaceful sort of game.