The Verdict
In the end, The Castle Game is a good buy for the budgeted price of $15. It offers solid replay value and trophies that don’t feel too far out of reach.
Despite the fact that the difficulty balance can be a bit off due to a lack of interactivity on the player’s end, the enemies themselves scale up at a near perfect pace. Once you start to unlock the magic spells and the upgraded archers, the game really begins to open up and lets you get creative.
Though I was skeptical at first about liking the game, The Castle Game has taught this TD newbie why so many gamers are addicted to it. If you are a veteran of the genre, you probably won’t find anything here that you haven’t seen before, but if you have the itch to defend a keep, you won’t find many quality Tower Defense games on the PlayStation 4 that can keep up with The Castle Game.
The Positives
- Really cool magic abilities that can lend a hand and even wipe out a single wave of enemy units in one fell swoop. Both the Lightning and Phoenix spells end up being crucial to your success, and if you upgrade them fully, they can turn the tide in an instant.
- No wasted upgrades. Everything is useful, and lends itself to a variety of strategies. Basic archers end up upgrading one of three ways, a Catapult, Ballista or Sorceress. Each one fulfills a particular role, so finding a balance between all three is critical. But all three definitely raise the stakes of the action effectively.
- Nice player interaction with the battles through the use of spells as opposed to sitting on the sidelines. As you progress through the game, more and more chaos inevitably ends up unfolding, so if one side of your keep finds itself in trouble, it’s immensely satisfying to come to the rescue with a well timed spell.
- Varied campaign levels really make you think about unit and building placement. Levels start out about as simply as it gets, with enemy waves coming from one direction. Eventually they will surround you, or even spawn right next to your keep.
- Very open ended in terms of how you want to build your defense. Each level is a blank canvas for the player to paint the most creative defense they can think of. It won’t be long until you find yourself thinking about the mistakes you made, or having an “aha!” moment when you’re away from the game.
- Every enemy unit is memorable, both in terms of design, and its threat level on the battlefield. From little goblins, to giant trolls and ghostly corruptors that can take over your units and wreck havok on you.
- The game gets better as you go along and unlock more powerful units. The game gets deeper as you complete campaign missions. Hoards of catapults will stop waves before they can even get started. Or you can lure a big boss right to you before it walks into your teleportation trap, sending it to the other side of the map, only to be blitzkrieged before it can get back to you.
- Sandbox and Survival modes offer solid replay value. In some ways, I enjoyed these extra modes more than the campaign itself as it allowed me to test myself in a much more freeform way. The campaign levels can be a bit restrictive in what you have to protect, but if you’re in a “come at me bro!” mood, definitely check out Sandbox and Survival after you unlock them.
- No trophies that feel impossible to get. Plus they are all Silver or higher (including Platinum).
The Negatives
- The game can be pretty tough at the beginning if you are a newbie. This can be a bit of a hurdle to get over at the outset. Especially if you don’t treat every wave as its own unique challenge.
- The lack of available units at the beginning makes the early battles tougher to win than ones that come at the end as player involvement is minimal. I found myself only frantically being able to repair walls and units, burning through resources in the process.
- The last boss in the game had some curious A.I. behavior. Instead of aggressively pursuing a point I knew was vulnerable, it would about-face and walk away right before it was in striking distance.
- The automated checkpoint system is a little too infrequent. Which leads into the last bullet point…
- In the campaign mode, I found that selling every unit I had in play and starting over was common practice. This could end up being very time consuming, especially if I died at a later point and had to restart and rebuild the same defense for a wave I already defeated.
The Castle Game is a sandbox tower defence game that offers a solid introduction to the TD genre if you are a newbie, but suffers from a slow beginning, some occasional odd A.I. behavior and difficulty fluctuations.
When I first sat down with the game, I had barely any idea what I was doing. I admit that I’m not much of a TD player, but I found that the game allowed me to learn from my mistakes pretty effectively through some basic trial and error. I had a tendency to build up walls in a perfect square around my castle, which worked better on paper than it did in practice.
Learning to create pathways towards your castle through the use of wall building end up being the most effective strategy, though it seems counter intuitive at first (why wouldn’t the enemy just break down the wall?). But you quickly learn that for some of the enemy types, that is the most efficient means of being a threat to the player, while simultaneously making the player more of a threat to the enemy. It is this play between efficiency that makes The Castle Game addictive at times.
The Castle Game is comprised of four unique play modes, Standard Difficulty Campaign, Hard Difficulty Campaign, Sandbox and Survival. Sandbox mode is a timed mode that tasks the player with building a singular defence with enhanced resources, and then sets them loose to see how long they can survive against endless waves of enemies, with 8 minutes being the goal. Survival mode is similar to Sandbox, but lets players change up and enhance their defense between waves, gaining resources for kills along the way.
Survival is pretty similar to how the Campaign missions play out, though there is no story details to speak of. Not that it’s of any consequence, but the story is pretty bare bones, if not irrelevant to the whole experience. A dark lord is looking to invade the land, and it’s up to you, the player to stop him. That’s about as far as it ever goes, serving more as a backdrop to what is going on.
Campaign missions do end up varying from time to time, as some task the player with escorting a group of miners to safety, or occasionally a boss will appear at the end of a set of waves that can annihilate units or walls in a single strike. These boss fights can seem a bit daunting at first, but as you unlock more abilities, things get easier.
What I found most odd about The Castle Game is that the campaign missions got easier as I went along, despite the fact that the enemy units were more plentiful and powerful. In the beginning of the game, it’s easy to feel helpless if you start to get overrun, as you don’t have any way of supporting your units. It really goes to show how necessary the upgrades you unlock are to your success.
Overall the game is pretty good, but let’s break down the good and the bad of The Castle Game.
