It's not often that I would play a game twice in a row, let alone a visual novel (-esque management sim).

Sovereign Tower has charming characters, good writing, and a decent plot, but that's not why it grabbed me. It's full of surprises! You never know which event might unlock a new knight for your roster. All knights have stats AND personalities (never matching perfectly, i.e. the fastest knight with a unique flying mount hates hunting). As such, they can create unique outcomes for events, both positive and negative, but you have to pay attention to find them. You have items that may have unique properties. You can find unexpected uses for things. It's all a joy to explore.

Some events are filler (but even they have charm). The main story is fixed. Still, my second playthrough featured a roster that was almost completely different from the first.

This is a Reigns-like kingdom management sim executed very well. I only wish you could skip all animations to make replays faster.

Fun game with some replayability built-in because of the rewind mechanics, but could use some enhancements.

- Large variety in characters in terms of design and personality. Also a big fan of the art style.
- Dispatch-like gameplay is fun. Near the end-game it does get tedious having to min-max your knights because you have so much equipment and mounts. I know I don't have to change the equipment every time, but that seemed to be a big portion of the gameplay. I wish there was an easier way to sort through all the stats the equipment would give your knight.
- I liked that there was an obvious romance dialogue option when talking to romanceable companions, but it did seem to incentivize just clicking that option every time to maximize happiness for your knights.


- The time travel mechanic is nice to have but having to sit through entire dialogue trees just to redo one decision disincentivizes using the mechanic.
- There is no purpose of having to manually speak to an NPC to build the rooms in your castle. You can always build the next room at no cost as soon as the corresponding NPC joins your entourage. Just adds some extra clicks.
- The main tower UI requires you to scroll through to see all the rooms you've built when they could have just been displayed side by side. I could understand maybe thematically if all the rooms were above each other on the tower and the UI was a reflection of that, but the rooms are not displayed that way.
- Forging armor is tedious. The Round Table UI already allows you to buy armor and consumables, why can't I also repair my knights' armor?

An interesting game that ends too soon with no real climax. Feels like an amazing demo and not a complete game. 8/10

If you loved Dispatch, this is currently the closest you'll get to scratching that itch. But don't be fooled; it is a very different game with its own strengths and weaknesses. This game is filled with charm, from the art style to the unique character design and goofy writing. But that charm is rather shallow; most characters are very one-note and simple. The story starts off very interesting but comes to a sudden end with no thematic conclusion to the questions I thought the story was asking.

The gameplay is fun, and I found it challenging at first. It takes heavy inspiration from games like Dispatch and This Is the Police but completely leaves out the time mechanic (aside from a handful of quests). This leads to a far more relaxing experience but leaves little room for skill expression. You'll never have to worry about sending all your magic knights or strong knights on the same quest because you can just wait for them to return before sending them on the next quest. This will be the biggest disappointment to Dispatch fans who were seeking the thrill of just barely getting your crew back in time for the next mission.

There is also far less interesting build variety. In dispatch you might have a character who is very fast and strong but is not that smart or durable, meaning you have to be smart about who you sent where. Sovereign Tower starts that way, but very quickly you'll find the best strategy is to give most of your knights even stats across the board, maybe leaving out one category, then giving them items to boost certain stats for a mission.

This is another massive loss in skill expression, as every knight build just turns into an "all-rounder" who's good at everything.

Similar to dispatch, there is also a unique ending to a quest if you send the right knight on a quest. This results in an automatic pass on a quest, but as far as I can tell, there is almost zero way of knowing which knight to send to achieve these, which leads to frustration. I found myself getting these unique outcomes far more in dispatch.

For example, you might think sending a character who is a musician to stop a group of bats who are weak to music might result in a unique quest ending, but you would be wrong. The outcomes lack any consistent logic or pattern.

The unique mechanic of this game is time travel. The game heavily encourages you to use it but hints that it might have dark consequences later. Those consequences never come, not in gameplay or story. You suffer no negative effects from using demon powers to manipulate time.

I avoided using time travel for the vast majority of the game. I only used it twice after losing knights to events you could not have predicted. In hindsight I could have easily beaten the game without ever using it, which just goes to show how easy the game is once you understand the mechanics.

Minor spoilers ahead

I found the story very interesting: a king who makes a pact with a demon to control time in order to create a peaceful world. You'll come across a whole list of interesting characters and challenges but ultimately face little consequence no matter what you choose. Like many "choices matter" games, it feels like your choices actually have little to no effect on the outcome aside from a few major decisions.

The ending comes very suddenly; the major antagonist isn't the evil monster you meet at the beginning; instead, it's a man you meet only twice. You meet him once at the beginning of the final act and once more at the end of the game. Who turns out isn't much of an antagonist at all.

While this has sounded very negative, I still very much enjoyed my time; it feels like Sovereign Tower is so close to being an amazing game, but the developers ran out of money and just wrapped up the game as fast as they could. There should at least be one or two more acts.

Easy buy at $15, a little steep for $20.