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Sacred Reviews: Castle Warfare

Introduction

"Castle Warfare" is described by Tw0Face, the game's developer, as a type of tower defense game, but this rings hollow in my opinion. After all, your goal in a tower defense game is to stop enemies from reaching a certain point on a map. While in contrast, your goal in "Castle Warfare" is to simply survive the onslaught of your enemies by buffing your defenses. After all, you can't stop them from reaching you in this game. You can only nerf how hard they hit you.

Story

You play as a nameless and faceless commander whose been put in charge of the defensive army of a nameless country. Truly this game has put a lot of thought into the background details that drive this game. After all, who hasn't heard the legend of the legendary country without a name. Who was saved by a legendary commander of unknown origins. After all, this is the greatest legend to ever traverse the multiverse of RPG Maker games.

All joking aside, this game really wouldn't benefit from throwing massive amounts of lore at the player, but it would be nice if Tw0Face included a few small details. These details centering around who were working for and why were being invaded. After all, you spend about a third of your time in this game dealing with enemy strongholds. So were clearly being attacked by forces that are being organized by somebody.

Gameplay

The game can be essentially split into two unique modes when it comes to combat. The standard combat you'll face is defensive in nature, which makes sense seeing as how you were called in to help the supreme commander of your countries defensive forces to help fend off armies of Orcs, Dwarves, Ogres, & Dragons. As for how you'll do this. Well you'll spend your time gathering resources and then allocating them to building various structures which will either aid you in defending your current location, supporting your forces with magic, trading a common resource for a resource that isn't available on your current map, or building up more industry in order to increase how many resources you gather in turn. And, if you wish to survive in the later missions you'll need to carefully allocate your resources to various tasks in order to survive.

In the other mode you'll be sent on offensive missions to take out enemy strongholds. These strongholds also act as the staging ground for invading enemies. So taking them out is vital for your continued survival. Though, in my opinion these missions are usually the least interesting. Since, you'll largely rely on the same tactic over and over again.

Graphics & Sound

On the graphical and sound side the game largely seems to rely on material from the RTP, but it does include a few custom bits and pieces here and there as well. Because of this the game really feels like just another generic RPG Maker game. At least in terms of how it looks and feels.

Conclusion

"Castle Warfare" may not stand out that much graphically, but it does offer a relatively unique form of play. After all, there aren't many RPG Maker games out there that are about resource management. At least not in the way this game is. On the downside, the difficulty curve can prove a bit much for some people, but I suppose if you run into issues you can always check out my Let's Play for the game. After all, I've already covered every map in the current build.

Bugs



The game does include one minor bug that can cause the game to crash. A bug that can be easily repeated and triggered, but seeing as how this bug can only be activated by backing out of the loading screen when you first start up the game. I really don't consider this a major issue, but I felt like I should include this information in the review.

Posts

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Thank you so much for writing this review! I hope you had a good time with the game. You've done a great job with the Walkthrough/Let's Play as well. Thanks for the big effort.

Still, it's too bad that you didn't like the offensive scenarios at all. Feel free to tell me your opinion about what I could've done better to make this more fun for you. Maybe I can consider these aspects in my next game.

Greetings,
Tw0Face
Sorry for the slow response. As for why I found the offensive scenarios boring. Well, you largely spent all your time on those scenarios systematically blowing up your enemies stuff. As such, it was pretty easy to run the same strategy over and over again on those missions. Sure you'd have to build up resources for larger amounts of time, but that only made those battles slow and tedious.

Though, I suppose part of the problem rests on my own shoulders as well. Since, I imagine their are more creative ways to deal with the enemy fortifications and defenses if your willing to exploit them, but I could never figure out a method for doing so that didn't feel needlessly forced or require more time, energy, and effort then it was worth.
author=thesacredlobo
Since, I imagine their are more creative ways to deal with the enemy fortifications and defenses if your willing to exploit them, but I could never figure out a method for doing so that didn't feel needlessly forced or require more time, energy, and effort then it was worth.

Once the enemy sets up a barricade, Tristan and Sam have the opportunity to hide behind it, so that archers can no longer hit them. Tristan also has a skill (Intercept), which draws the attention of the archers on him. With this skill combination, you can be completely immune to watchtowers attacks for a certain time, which gives you a big advantage. Lydia can encourage an ally so that he can attack enemy buildings and gather resources at the same time. These approaches are designed to make offensive scenarios more varied, exciting and easier. But maybe they were too easy from the start.
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