Difficulty

The Wave 15 Trap You queue into Hard mode for the first time. You have cleared Normal mode wave 90 three times. Your Upgraded Cameraman deletes everything. You are confident. The first 10 waves feel identical to Normal — maybe the enemies take an extra hit or two, but nothing your Titans cannot handle. Then wave 15 spawns. Shielded enemies walk onto the map. Your Upgraded Cameraman’s beam, which one-shots everything in Normal, deals 20% damage. Your Upgraded Speakerman’s rapid fire chips away at the shield bar but cannot break it. The shielded units walk past your entire defense line. They hit your base. By wave 18, you are staring at a defeat screen with 3,200 Cen in the bank and no Titan Drill Man deployed. ...

Dana finally did it. Wave 90, Normal mode, victory screen, the whole loadout on the field. She’d spent two weeks grinding her way there — forty-plus games of the same two early Titans, the same purchase order, the same savings discipline. The results screen was still loading when she queued Hard mode. It seemed like the obvious next step. She had beaten the game. Hard was just Normal with a higher ceiling. What else was there to do? ...