What Rogue Tower desperately needs is to respect the player’s time. So hey, if you actually want to see a run through to the end, you better have an hour clear! Surely, you can just save and quit in the middle of the run, right? As it stands, no, you can’t. And as much as I enjoy that experience, I do think it gets tiring on multiple runs. Like, yeah, you can try different tower combinations and maybe the land generation could be more generous, but the experience will always feel the same. But with Rogue Tower, it’s still a tower defense game at its core. It can be a time sink, which is something I wanted to avoid.Īnd the thing is, I could justify doing multiple Binding of Isaac runs or something like that, but the thing with Isaac is that play sessions could be drastically different from each other depending on what you take. If I lose, well, I ain’t gonna spend another half hour on this. I have not properly won a game of Rogue Tower yet, and a big factor of that is that I’m not eager to go through multiple sessions. A decent run – one that might not even win, mind you – could potentially last an hour, and at best you can probably just save a few minutes with good planning. ![]() You ever watch a platformer get played on AGDQ or something and the runner complains about autoscrollers since the speed is largely fixed and dependent on external factors? Rogue Tower feels like the autoscrollers of roguelikes. God help you if you have most of your towers clustered toward one area and lack the long-range to deal with slow enemies like zombies, because they sure do take their time to walk on over and fucking die. ![]() You will have to go through every wave, and you will have to kill every enemy (or let them pass, whatever), and there are a lot of them. Roguelike sessions are typically long, sure, but with good skill and luck, you could drastically cut down on the length of an average session. So, that leads me into my biggest point of contention with Rogue Tower: a good session just takes too damn long. I clearly like Rogue Tower, but surely, it’s not all pleasant, right? It might be a bit ill-fitting, but it rules, so who’s to say what’s good or bad? Start a proper game going and the instrumentals of a drummer just going apeshit gets added to the preparation music. While the core experience of Rogue Tower feels easygoing to play and the visuals are bright voxels, the game’s soundtrack is surprisingly intense. It’s rather easygoing – which is strongly contrasted with the game’s music. Wrangling with the pathing RNG to create optimal playfields for towers is fun. Trying to figure out a good combination of towers to use is fun. I love any playstyle that lets me tear things apart this way. Get some good ballista spam in there with upgrades that do extra damage against stuff suffering from DOTs and boy does it make for a satisfying time. Get a tunnel of flamethrowers and poison sprayers going while sawblades get hurled down the path. Personally, my favored playstyle is the stuff that stacks DOT. Their benefits are too small to justify the mana cost that could be used for setting people on fire. Though, I think the most important of the support towers toward the endgame are universities – they rely a bit on RNG, but they’re a massive help for general stat increases across all your towers. There’s also some towers that’s more aimed toward supporting, like the mana generating ones. Several towers rely on using mana, and while you have to micromanage mana generation, most of the magic towers are generally useful, so it’s worth it. You got a tower that tosses out sawblades that zip down the path to rip enemies up (my fave stylistically). You got a good ol’ mortar that fires slow but hits multiple things. You start out with ballistas, which are basic but are optimal for builds that rely on spam. Ideally, you should focus down on everything that improves card draw and choice selection as soon as possible.Īs for the towers, there’s a nice basic variety of stuff. Outside of the main game, you can spend the experience points you get to buy new towers and upgrades to choose from in a session. When building out, it’s also possible to find a portal where enemies spawn from, so that you can maybe get an early edge on a wave by getting a killbox going at its entrance.Ī second roguelike conceit is that you can get upgrades and new towers at certain points. ![]() ![]() If possible, you can try to steer the enemy path to be adjacent to pre-existing ones so you can place towers in between them for efficient coverage. While randomly generated, you’ll get a choice when the path reaches a crossroads, where you can choose to build the path out in a fixed direction. You’re required to build out to start each round, taking you to who knows where. One of the roguelike conceits of Rogue Tower is that the enemy paths and the terrain you can place towers on are random.
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