"Rogue Tower is a tower defense game with roguelike elements and a continuously expanding path which you can influence. Unlock new towers and buildings, build up your defenses, upgrade your towers through card draws and cash, expand the path tactically to control how enemies move and defend your tower." -Die of Death Games
What is Rogue Tower?
Rogue Tower is a combination of two very popular game categories on their own: Tower Defense and Roguelike. Your goal is to defend your Tower (Home Base) against waves of enemies, that get progressively stronger, by placing defensive towers. You gain gold by killing enemies which you use to buy these towers. At the end of each wave, you need to expand the map. The map is made up of a series of connected tiles that are randomly generated. The random generation of each tile creates replayability and ensures that no two games are the same.
When you lose, the experience that you gained over your run is used to purchase upgrades. They come in two forms, Permanent Upgrades and Upgrade Cards. Permanent Upgrades will affect every run you have from this point forward. Upgrade cards are things like new defensive towers and new abilities and upgrades for those towers that you have a chance of using each run by reset when you finish or lose that run.
Rogue Tower currently has three game modes: Single Defense, Double Defense and Triple Defense. The only change between the game modes is the number of approaches to the base of your main Tower. Either one, two or three. As is expected, two approaches are notably harder than one, and three is harder than two. You are rewarded with more experience on the harder game modes.
There are currently 18 different enemy types not including the bosses. They each have varying statistics, strengths, and weaknesses. Strategies that may work in the early game won’t work in the late game due the variety of enemy types and difference between the early monsters and late game monsters.
What I liked?
The biggest draw for me was the combination of Tower Defense and Roguelike elements. I really enjoy permanent progression between runs, and it is clearly identifiable in the game. It also means that you can try several different strategies as you unlock different defensive towers and different upgrades for them.
For those of you that are familiar with the board game Carcassonne, I liked the tile based expansion of the map and the random generation of it. It makes you focus on sound employment of towers without relying on a known layout of a map. This creates a unique experience each time you start a new run which helps with the repetitive nature of Tower Defense games.
I am also a big fan of the 8 bit style graphics for the enemies and towers. It is simple but the retro graphics are enjoyable and the soundtrack really complements them.
What can be improved?
This game needs some quality of life upgrades. The UI is clunky and can get in the way when you are trying to place towers or move around the map. It is also very basic and doesn't feel like it is customised for the game. It consists of a simple text font and border around it. It could be enhanced with a pixel art UI system.
Rogue Tower lacks the ability to adjust time. Whether you want to speed up or slow down the gameplay; it doesn't exist. This means that it can be stressful when there are a lot of enemies on the screen but conversely; it is painful when enemies spawn at the other end of the map and you are waiting minutes for them to reach your towers.
The game would also benefit from some additional tile sets (Desert, Snow, Mountain etc) and an Endless Mode. At this current release of the game there are only 45 waves and then the game finishes.
Developer: Die of Death Games
Publisher: Die of Death Games
Cost: $14.99 USD
Genre: Tower Defense, Roguelike, Strategy
Version: 1.0.12
Time played: 6 hours
Recommended: Yes
