This is what I would consider a solid 7/10 game. It's a simple concept, you get units and you get towers. Tower's don't move and use AI targeting, while units you have full control over. After each wave you'll be presented with one of three options to upgrade one hero. There's rarity involved so some runs can just be worn with an early high roll. After 4 waves you face a final boss wave which gives a high rarity upgrade. You have a small break to spend xp and gold on upgrading heroes or towers. Each run the "tree" of each unit is randomized, which does keep a freshness to each run. Also with randomizing the spells you start with.

This game, for me, is lacking in two areas. Difficulty and hero diversity. As a note, I haven't unlocked each character. There's a total of three classes of units, a frontliner, an rogueish character, and a mage. While each unit feels very different from another, the alternatives don't feel too different from the base. The roguish category suffers from this the least and the mage the most. I personally feel that not dying when killed is just better than four armor is you didn't move, so there's also a small lack of balance between the alternatives.

The bigger problem is just the game isn't that hard. I'm pretty experienced with roguelikes though. It took me to ascension 4 to have a rocky run. Even then I still beat it. I currently have yet to lose a run. You're bound in a run to get one of the too powerful cards. Here's my highlights.

My warrior has range 6 and auto kills any unit at 48 hp or less after an attack. He also get's to attack a second time if he kills a unit.

Or my most powerful run

My mage chains lightning for 18 damage at range 5 and stuns everyone hit. Whenever a unit dies all enemy units take 6.

Or

My mage attacks everyone within 6 range for 30 damage, if she kills a unit she can attack again. This was my first run and the final boss was usually just me attacking with her twice, wiping the board, making the boss go invulnerable, and then having everyone else on my team sit around.

It's not a bad game, it's a really well made game. If you're not looking for a balls to the wall hard roguelike here's a great place to start. I would heavily recommend giving it a try if that's your cup of tea. I'll be coming back to it again!

While I have enjoyed my time with the game so far, there just isn't that much game. It lacks depth and is very easy. I have done 4 runs so far and haven't even come close to losing. In fact, I am usually able to obliterate all the enemies the turn they spawn. In terms of content, you get 3 heroes (from 4 eventually but each category plays basically the same), 3 towers (from 3), with very incremental upgrades between waves and the 5 levels. There are 2 variants of levels 2-4 where the scenery is different and you fight different enemies but it didn't ever make a difference to me as the enemies rarely got a turn.

OMG this game is so fun.

It's like a weird version of chess but with Tower Defense and turn based RPG elements. Incredibly hard to explain and the first night I got it I was up until 7:30 AM playing it.

The game is a big "Meh" from me. It's enjoyable, but it clearly lacks balance and depth, and is extremely easy, even with the new "experienced mode". I've done 8 runs, always in the hardest difficulty available, and never came close to even losing a hero, let alone the game. Your heroes quickly skyrocket in power and rollstomp anything, I don't think I've ever let the last 2 boss play a turn in any of my games.

The "Alternate heroes and tower" offer a bit of welcome diversity, but the heroes upgrades, where most of your power will come from, is unchanged in all your game, so they will still look very much alike. The two different variant for 4 of the 5 acts is clearly a bonus tho.

It's not a very important point in the game, but the story is terrible and made even more terrible that you will repeat it, and its "plot twist", every game.

Overall a 5/10 game, I hesitated to put it between a very low-end "good" and a good-end "bad".

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Defend the Rook is a game combining turn-based strategy with tower defense genres, in addition to being a roguelite with run-to-run permanent upgrades and progression. If you enjoy both TBS and TD genres, this game will be a fun addition to your library. For people who like the idea of the TD genre but who may find the active and continuous enemy movements to be stressful, this game allows you to think before you move, thus making it more accessible as well.

The game provides a separate tutorial, and it is very easy to understand.

The game is set up in a level-by-level basis, with five waves within each level. The final wave is always a boss wave and they are pretty difficult. I think there are five levels total, but I have yet to beat the fifth level at this time.

Even though there is some kind of a story between the levels, I was not paying that much attention to it. I was eager to move forward to the next level usually.

The battlefield is set up so that you have the rook, which must stay alive, and also three heroes along with three towers. You can unlock more heroes later by winning levels. The towers can be placed whenever during the level.

The towers attack at the beginning of each turn. However, if you lose a tower in a prior wave, you will not have access to the same tower until you complete the level. You can move your heroes around on the map, and they can attack or use items to impede enemy progress.

After each wave, you will be presented with three random buffs; of course you will pick the one most suitable for your situation/need.

The game is a roguelite, with the run ending if your rook dies. During your run, you will earn gemstones after completing each level, and they allow you to make some upgrades for the next run.

The graphics look very good, and I really enjoy this art style.

The music is not outstanding in any way.

The game can be fully played with a mouse.

The game offers fun and challenging gameplay, with plenty of things to unlock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V8UMjQo0LU

Defend the Rook is a really fun game. I really enjoy both turn-based strategy and tower defense style games and by combing the two and allowing me time to think, I found it to be less stressful than the standard TD games. The gameplay is engaging and fun, while also presenting a certain degree of a challenge. I have yet to complete a run, but I think I am rather close.

I can recommend this game for sure.

Verdict: 8/10

I received the product for free. I did not receive any compensation to write this review. The opinions represented here are entirely my own and were not influenced in any way.

Great game, highly recommend trying it out. It might seem a little easy at first for this type of game where often you are meant to die a bunch and slowly become stronger with upgrades. You have 1-10 ascension levels, but the first 4 are super easy and then 7+ becomes pretty tough. I'm not super excited about how it scales at 7+ because it feels like artificial difficulty, everything starts to cost twice as much so you can't upgrade everything. I would prefer the enemies becoming more challenging rather than having less upgrades.

You have 3 classes and 1 rook, but each class and the rook have 3 sub-classes. For example you start off with Warrior, Mage, Rogue and then later the warrior upgrades to samurai who has different, but similar stats and a different ability. Lots of options, almost too many with how upgrades work. After each wave you pick 1 upgrade between 3 choices, 1 choice for each character, but you can only pick 1 total. You have 5 waves x 5 levels so lots of upgrades.

You can also pick 3 different towers and each tower also has 3 different choices as you upgrade. You can also pick 2 add on things like a barrel to taunt enemies, freeze trap, bomb, etc.. these 2 choices each have 3 total choices. The game def does not lack on choices to play a variety of ways.

This game is not perfect, but I'm very happy and feel like it was definitely worth the money I spent. Still haven't finished it. Even during the easy runs at the start I always had fun playing this game.

Unless you're itching for more roguelike strategy games, I would skip this one. It's ok at best but suffers from huge balancing issues, basically making it impossible to run multiple styles of builds.

The gameplay loop is fine at first glance (I played on the new experienced mode, which was still easy). Good strategy, good leveling mechanics, and boss battles are generally interesting enough. It's just you'll find the majority of hero options suck and they don't even each have their own unique upgrades. Warriors (melee in general) are basically useless and hardly even worth investing in. Ranger and Dark Lord are basically your bread and butter. The alternate classes in their archetypes are horrible. Haven't tried the battle brothers, but not playing till ascension 9 to find out, only to complete the game one stage later (this was a stupid choice for the devs to do in the first place).

I'm honestly bored even writing this review. I feel like my time was a bit robbed as the loop is engaging enough to make you think there will be some depth at the end of the rainbow, but you find there is none and leave disappointed.

One other side gripe is you can't pick your spells. You can pick literally everything else before you start, but not your spells. However, you can reboot the game and refresh the spells. This, to me, just screams novice design decision. Go play Monster Train some more. You'll have a lot more fun.

Overall this game gets a 5/10 recommendation. A playable game that lacks story and depth.

I really like that you get 3 different character classes, spells and towers to help defend the rook. The rook itself is not a helpless onlooker and will in fact be a very strong piece.

As it is a rogue lite, you can upgrade your spells and unlock different towers and character classes with each play through.

After each map within the scenario , everything carries over - even health damage! This leads to more thought out decisions to whether or not you want to lose a tower to defend your rook or move a character over to take damage early on to prevent one of your towers from being torn down.

Unfortunately this game fails to deliver a sense of strong story progression. In fact, I find myself skipping the dialogue in the beginning of each map and at the end. This is very unlike myself as I often enjoy reading about the story for any game in which I play.

This game begins to feel quite repetitive as it is the same square map that you must defend your rook in. Certainly in some games simplicity is key. However, I can't help but think that differing map loadouts would have helped break up the monotony after each battle.

This is alot of fun, but insanely easy.

I really liked everything this game had to offer. The units are fun to play around with and you can build some truely insane setups if you play your cards right.

However, even by easy game terms, this is one for the books. I cleared every single ascended difficulty in a row without ever losing a single time. I tend to suck at alot of games, and this level of 100% success never happens to me.

But, fun. Worth a play to any fan of the tactical genre.

I made a video review with a quick introduction of the game mechanics here if you prefer a video - Text version below!

https://youtu.be/lV53HRaGYJM


Defend The Rook is a blend between a turn-based combat game, a wave type tower defense and some roguelite progression inbetween. The game is really easy to pick up, yet hard to master, due to a ton of different upgrades and interactions between heroes, turrets and traps. There's also a lot of unlockable content (new heroes, towers, spells and such), offering even more options to mix and match and build new strategies.

What I liked:
The game really surprised me with the smooth gameplay from the beginning. Everything is easy to understand, yet there are so many different upgrades for the heroes, creating complexity while you progress - feels good and fun to learn. There's also a lot of unlockables and different stuff which immediately made me happy to see. Several new difficulty levels offer a pretty long gameplay experience.

What I didn't like:

I dislike the "unlock" system in general, artificially lowering my options from the beginning. This is a necessary evil for Roguelites and probably also a personal preference. In general there isn't much to mutter about, the biggest issue being not too many innovations - every element of Defend The Rook has been seen somewhere else, somehow. It's not really a glaring issue though, cause the mixture of "borrowed elements" turned into something truly new and enjoyable. But this one won't set new standards either.

My summary:

The game is totally worth your time if you like Turn Based Combat and/or Tower Defense. There's a lot to do and it's really dirty cheap on top of that. Defend The Rook is easy to learn, offering entertainment very quickly, while offering a lot of depth with crazy upgrade combos. Definitely worth the buy!