Recent reviews by Elmok

After playing for 4 hours and getting a win under my belt, I feel like the game just isn't balanced enough to recommend it.
Issues:

The enemies spike up hard between the first and second act (and from the second to third, to a lesser degree) even though beating the act boss doesn't increase your power at all. you don't even full heal after the act boss, so suddenly you're thrown against much harder enemies with little counter play

your units die for good barring some items/unit [unit singular], and there isn't any post battle healing. it is incredibly easy to get chipped away and lose with no counter play because you just didn't get offered a healing unit

the new units offered in the second and third act really aren't balanced/scaled well, leading them to get one or two shot the second you get them. then they're gone for good so you might as well have not gotten that event.

I encountered a random battle in the second act that had 200 health and did 40 damage to all of my units, clearing my entire team instantly. zero counter play, nothing I could have done. this isn't an uncommon occurrence either

I could go on, but those are just some examples of the game being too unforgiving and poorly balanced. will be updating review if the game becomes more fair

I want to recommend this game because it has a good concept and could be really good in the future, but for everything it does right it does 2 things wrong

things it does right:
interesting mechanic of upgrading spells
interesting mechanic of linking attacks
interesting take on bosses

problems
-upgrades are poorly balanced, for each upgrade option there is almost certainly a best choice
-very few attacks to choose from, and very few methods of linking
-the bosses themselves are pretty basic and the rewards are underwhelming
-lack of enemy variety
-lack of visibility, especially with the gnome projectiles that kill you in 2-4 hits
-the 4 "focus runes" (attack patterns) are poorly balanced
-not enough variety in runes
-clunky and buggy menu system

game has potential, but it's just not good yet

(also, ignore my playtime, i forgot to close the game overnight. actual playtime to 100% was more like 3 hours)

Rogue Tower is a mediocre tower defense game and a bad roguelite. there are multiple critical design flaws and the game lacks a lot of qol and polish. the dev has decided that instead of trying to fix these issues, they were going to double down and call it "part of the design"

Tower Defense:
the most unique part of the tower defense is the constantly expanding map, which is a unique concept but isn't explored to the fullest and creates pacing issues [see below]

the tower/strategy aspect is really lacking. with the exception of one support tower (which isnt even good), every tower works completely independently of one another, most towers are one note, and the game actually punishes you for taking/trying diverse strategies [see below]

the monsters _could_ be cool, except there's no way to view the next set of monsters, there's no way to target monsters with certain behaviors, and the game presents the monsters by spamming them by the dozen, so there's really no deeper strategy. you'll quickly find a one-size-fits-all defense is the best win method because building your defense to counter one enemy type will make you lose the second a different new enemy type comes out. the march of monster update talked about preparing for different threats coming up, but you can't do that because you can't even view what the upcoming wave consists of

the upgrade system is the most flawed part of the game

Roguelite:
the meta progression comes in the form of upgrade cards you can collect in-run, with some added permanent upgrades locked behind having x amount of upgrade cards. the problem is bloat; if you want to try a specific strategy you'll find your deck wayyy to bloated with useless cards, and you can't respec your unlocks without hard resetting your save. this is intentional by the dev and most likely wont change

the upgrade system is the most roguelite aspect and also the worst aspect. you start with a basic ballista, and everything else is unlocked through upgrade cards awarded at the end of every 1/2/3 rounds (depending on meta progress). the issue is that almost every card has extra unlocks attached to it, so if you take a card that isn't useful, your card pool becomes flooded with even more useless cards. also, the powerful and good upgrades are locked behind the weak and useless upgrades, so you have to make MULTIPLE bad picks before getting a chance at getting a good one. like, I get why health damage 3 is locked behind health damage 2, but why is flaming arrow 1 locked behind armor damage 1? yes, roguelites have good and bad upgrades, but why are all of the good ones locked behind multiple bad ones, and towers really underperform without the good upgrades, meaning if you want to use a tower you need to commit to upgrading it several times, which isn't a guarantee because the roguelike randomness. there isn't even a way to reroll or skip, so you can easily get railroaded into flooding your draw pool with crap. dev doesnt want to add rerolls/skips because "it's not a deckbuilder" [his words almost exactly]

there's also the mana system, which means that if you want to effectively use 7/15 of the towers (more than half) you're going to have to take multiple upgrades on mana alone, which doesn't even boost the tower's power, because if you run out of mana your mana towers stop attacking and the enemies just run right by. effectively using half the towers in the game is gated behind multiple upgrades, and both mana cards and mana towers are useless without the other.

lack of polish and quality of life:
there is no speed up. maybe this wouldn't be so horrible, but the way the map front line constantly expands while you are actively punished for trying to move your defense forwards means you're going to end up with a central kill zone, waiting for the enemies to slowly crawl into the kill zone and die.

there is no mid run saving. in fact, the saving the game DOES have is saved to your computers registry, which is a horrible idea and also a DELIBERATE choice made by the dev. the fact that complete runs take 45+ minutes means no mid-run saving is already kinda bad, but add on the fact that the bestiary and upgrade tree are both accessible from the main menu only and now it's a huge hassle, having to rely on third party web pages/software to get basic critical information while playing the game.

horrible ui scaling. I have a smaller monitor so this doesnt affect me directly, but this has been a complaint since day one and dev more or less said "I don't want to redo ui". why is the dev so stuck on staying with bad systems?

a lot of little things that don't detract from the gameplay, but show a lack of polish. not being able to see next waves. not being able to rotate the camera (despite this actually affecting gameplay, because some tiles can get completely blocked by others). non-adaptive ui elements. information only being accessible from the main menu.

also, while attempting to discuss concerns and criticisms of the balance updates in the discord's game discussion chat, some [read: multiple] of the beta testers attempted to shut down the conversation, and at some points directly insulted me. if this is the way the dev's inner circle acts and behaves, it reflects really poorly on the dev.

the game could be worth 15$ in the future, but if the developer continues on the path of doubling down instead of fixing the game i can't say i recommend it
UPDATE: I have played every update since writing this review and my opinion is unchanged. this is supposedly the "final update" and the game still has glaring issues that have been present since day 1

fun.

10/10 best dollar i ever spent

2/5

this game used to be great and a lot of fun to play with friends and even by yourself. however, this game has a lot of bugs that just ultimately ruin the experience.

The game crashed at the final boss. After getting past level 40, spending a lot of time gearing up and finalyl beating the boss, it crashed for me and my friend. We had done so much

Arrows are broken in multiplayer. they do insane amounts of damage for no reason.

an ocassional duping glitch

items getting stuck in walls

it would be great if it wasn't so buggy to the pooint of unplayability

Fun game, only managed to make it past the first non tutorial level so far, there is lots of stuff to learn and practice