- Innovative rolling city defense gameplay.
- Satisfying roguelite progression and replayability.
- Features appealing art style, but repetitive soundtrack.
- Gameplay often feels shallow with limited choices.
- Critical crashes frequently result in lost progress.
- Progression can be a frustrating, repetitive grind.
Emotions
Players felt satisfied due to the game's overall high quality, excellent design choices, and fair value for money. Key elements included well-designed difficulty, an engaging progression loop with a good mix of gameplay, and continuous improvements from the demo, all contributing to a fun and unique experience.
Excitement stemmed from the game's interesting and unusual mechanics, a fresh take on its genre, and its engaging gameplay that proved highly addictive. The quality, replayability, and strong positive impression upon discovery, especially after trying the demo, also contributed significantly.
Joy was primarily caused by the game offering an overall enjoyable and fun experience. Players found specific pleasure in the unique take on the genre, enjoyable gameplay mechanics like harvesting and upgrading, and the discovery of a truly special and high-quality game.
Disappointment arose from a perceived lack of gameplay variety, insufficient city-building depth, and uncreative game design or balancing issues. Players were also let down by repetitive music, limited meta-progression, and specific unpopular changes to mechanics.
Annoyance was specifically linked to the game's music, described as unpleasant, repetitive, distracting, and often off-place. Short looping tracks and loud, annoying guitar riffs were frequently cited as causes.
Verdict
Mostly positive
Summary
Positive 88% · Negative 12%. Score: 12 / 100
Positives:
- Players overwhelmingly find the game fun, engaging, and addictive, praising its unique blend of genres, well-balanced difficulty, and overall high quality for its price. Many immediately bought the full game after playing the demo, finding it a special experience that offers many hours of entertainment.
- Reviewers are highly satisfied with the changes and content introduced in the full release, noting improved balance, quality of life enhancements, new maps, and overall polish compared to the demo. The developers are praised for listening to feedback and providing quick fixes post-launch.
- Players consistently praise the game's attractive visual style and appealing graphics. The music is highlighted as exceptionally good, with a guitar-heavy soundtrack that fits the game's atmosphere perfectly.
- The game features a well-designed and satisfying progression loop with simple yet effective upgrade systems. This system, combined with a variety of unlocks and strategic choices, makes the game highly replayable and addictive.
- The game is noted for its crisp performance, top-notch UI/UX, and generally tight controls. This contributes to a smooth and enjoyable player experience, even on low-end devices.
Negatives:
- Players consistently report the game feels shallow and lacks depth, offering minimal strategic variety or meaningful decisions. This is evident in repetitive runs, uninteresting meta-progression with basic stat boosts, limited synergies for buildings and upgrades, and a perceived lack of player agency in city planning and hero development, leading to a quickly tiring and unrewarding experience.
- The game's music, particularly its "crunchy monotone guitar" riffs, is widely criticized for being unpleasant, repetitive, and distracting. Many players found the soundtrack so annoying they turned it off completely, expressing frustration that this issue persists and negatively impacts their gaming experience.
- The game's difficulty curve is perceived as unbalanced, making advancement feel like an unrewarding grind where players must repeatedly play lower difficulties just to accumulate basic skills. Meta-progression offers minimal impact with minor statistical increases, contributing to a sense of repetitive and forced progression rather than satisfying growth.
- Players frequently experience game crashes during crucial gameplay moments, such as leveling up or interacting with menus, rendering the game unplayable for many. The lack of mid-run save points exacerbates this issue, as crashes result in significant loss of progress and lead to high player frustration.
- Smaller issues were noted, including a rigid mobile castle movement that gets stuck on minor obstacles, the absence of a setting to ban undesired buildings, and a negatively received change to hero leveling from collection-based to chest-only. These points, while less critical, suggest areas for polish and improved player control.
Gameplay:
- The game uniquely blends Tower Defense, Roguelite, City Builder, and Vampire Survivors-like elements. Players manage a hero, build a customizable moving city, and defend against waves of enemies, offering a fresh take on these established genres.
- The central gameplay involves protecting a constantly moving 'traction city' as it crawls along a path, facing continuous enemy waves. Players must defend and expand this mobile city, which automatically moves forward and is targeted by foes.
- Gathering resources like wood, stone, and gold is crucial. Wood enhances tower attack speed, stone repairs fortress HP, and gold is used for shop purchases, requiring active collection and strategic allocation.
- The game features persistent roguelite progression where successes and failures unlock new improvements. Each run is short and made fresh by procedurally generated paths and randomized bosses, with dying being a key part of the upgrade loop.
- Players find the game's simple concept enjoyable yet challenging, requiring constant activity. While often busy, some feedback indicates that the purpose of all the activity could be clearer.
Performance:
- Players report the game crashing unexpectedly during various actions such as leveling up, selecting buildings, and opening menus. This indicates a significant stability issue that severely impacts the gameplay experience.
- The game reportedly runs poorly on the Steam Deck, to the extent that a third-party tool like Lossless Scaling is considered essential for a smooth experience. This highlights a need for better optimization specifically for the Steam Deck platform.
Recommendations:
- Players overwhelmingly recommend the game, frequently citing its excellent value for the price point and the hours of gameplay it offers. The game is particularly appealing to fans of specific genres such as roguelite, tower defense, indie, and strategy games, though some reviewers note it might not be for everyone.
Miscellaneous:
- Players, even those with limited initial playtime, express a strong desire for continuous updates, including new levels, towers, and power-ups. There is also specific interest in adding a multiplayer mode to enhance replayability and expand the game's potential.
- Despite not being a AAA title, there's a general sentiment that other players will find the game enjoyable. This indicates a positive overall impression, though the feedback is general and lacks specific actionable details.
- Feedback indicates a noticeable disparity in player engagement, with some players experiencing only a few hours of gameplay while others report hundreds or thousands. This suggests a potential difference in game depth or long-term appeal for various player segments.
