Fair difficulty vs cheap difficulty in mobile games

A hard game and an unfair game can feel similar in the moment, but they're worlds apart, and telling them apart changed how we review.

Fair difficulty means you can point to the mistake. You placed the tower late, you selected the wrong unit, you missed the wave preview. The loss teaches you something.

Cheap difficulty hides information or springs surprises you couldn't have planned for. A boss that suddenly triples its speed with no warning isn't hard, it's just annoying.

We test this by asking one question after a loss: could I have done something differently with what the game showed me? If the answer is yes, the design is doing its job.

The best strategy and tower defence games make failure feel like a lesson, not a slap. Those are the ones we keep on our phones long after the review is done.