Review | Thronefall - The Emperor's New Tower Defence
Thronefall provides a minimalist Tower Defense experience without much else. Though I haven’t touched the tower defence genre in quite some time, though I do have fond memories of it as per mods in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne such as Legion TD. Much like those games of old, you have a mostly stationary force of towers, buildings, and obstacles that an unknown force will try to demolish and topple your Castle, resulting in a game over. I say unknown force as the strange shapes, creatures, and soldiers are apparently commanded by The Corrupt King, who for some reason doesn’t want you to rebuild the realm. Why he doesn’t just resume rule, or enforce a new era with his legions isn’t explained, but regardless, you are burdened with glorious purpose.
Your monarch rides on their trusty steed, with a weapon of choice in hand. You’ll build a wide variety of buildings from the obligatory towers to smite foes, to fields to earn coin, and even more specialized buildings like Temples. Unlike some tower defence games, you must balance economy with defensive and offensive buildings, which is especially tricky in that you don’t control where you’re able to place buildings. For instance, valuable resource-gathering buildings such as gold mines, fishing harbours, and fields are often in hard-to-defend places, and if a building is destroyed, it stops functioning for that night. You have to defend your resource-gathering buildings and not just place them as some enemies even prioritize ruining your economy.
The colours of Thronefall are beautiful, but enemies can be hard to parse in terms of what exactly they are, but also if they are attacking and who they are attacking. Even without mutators enabled that can be fatal. Combat feedback, or lack thereof is an issue of the minimalist style they’ve invoked.
The music is nice, though sparse. Grizzly Games is a small team, so the naturalistic sounds during the day and more intense string music at night works, but I would’ve liked a couple more tracks as you’ll be hearing them many times and some are repeated in different areas.
Gameplay is definitely what you should be coming to Thronefall for. With nine weapons, fifty-four perks(you can choose up to five), and eighteen mutators, you can create your own difficulty and experience, like the bonus modes that are unlocked after finishing the ten stages provided. I would love to say I enjoyed my experience the entire way through, but I didn’t. When choosing a stage, you’re tasked with optional quests which start out reasonable, but eventually become deceptively cruel (hint: look at how much bonus XP you’ll receive, if it’s over 50% you’re probably in for a rough time).
Actually marking the quests by difficulty, and not just a lettered list would take out some of the player frustration I experienced. At the end of the day, quests are definitely optional, but it is nice to have something to shoot for as someone who breezed through the content to a point.
Initially, I had fun and success by specialising my monarch as a commander, reducing my damage by 60%, but strengthening my units and towers by 40%, and having my units and buildings do the dirty work for me. I was able to rely on this to a fault until Sturmklamm when trying the ‘E’ Quest. The game at that point turned into a trial of frustration, as it may appear like you have many options with weapons, perks, and mutators, but in reality, many of the variations you can choose from won’t score you a victory. Even without mutators, which make the stage much more challenging, I found myself struggling to even damage some of the later bosses, most notably, the final boss.
I’ve dabbled in plenty of tower defence games before this one, and many elements that would be present to mitigate some of the frustration and difficulty aren’t in the game. Generally, in tower defence games, you’ll have the ability to create obstacles, if not an entire maze enemies will have to make their way through to threaten your castle centre. There are also some tower defence games where you’ll be able to build a variety of towers with many different functions, such as slowing poison, dealing a percentage of damage instead of flat numbers, or freezing enemies. In Thronefall, you’ll most likely end up in a specialisation through upgrading the castle centre which allows you to reflect damage at enemies, and deal 25% of an enemy’s total health to enemies initially. The problem is, that this invalidates much of what your gold can be spent on and tosses all the experimentation out of the window. I can’t speak for any other players, but when the preferred way to play is being a human pincushion and constantly dying, it became a deflating experience.
I would understand if using a small subsect of top-tier strategies would be needed for getting full achievement credit, for instance, but this applies to even finishing the game. I made a poll not too long ago surveying some fighting gamers, and one of the results from it was that player expression is a hugely important part of what players want from a game. Having only one real viable build is like being told the character you really like in a fighting game or the build you’re using in an RPG isn’t actually going to be able to get you to the credits. Devastating, to say the least.
There’s also an endless mode and some bonus modes after you beat the game that challenges you to do special maps with a specific build already chosen. I can’t say after having to inch my way forward to beat the main campaign that I had much of an appetite for any more Thronefall, though.
Thronefall presents a minimalist tower defence game to a fault. While the lack of viable strategies could be fixed, and enemies could be more defined, adding more music, options, and variables would work against the theme of minimalism. They say art is in the eye of the beholder, after all.
Pros:
Snappy TD Gameplay
Create your own difficulty with Mutators
High Replayability
Superb Risk/Reward gameplay (to a point)
Cons:
Difficulty spike that hurts player choice
Minimalist visuals muddy gameplay
Limited player tools
Score: 6/10
