Who said tower defence games were dead? We’ve had Elemental War TD and Steampunk Tower II in the past month, and now we have Royal Tower Defense, bringing us a simpler and more colourful variation on the joys of base-defending and upgrading towers. Royal Tower Defense is out now on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch and PC.
From the weirdly named Prison Games, Royal Tower Defense may not look particularly high-fidelity or spangly, but it does have a few things that are catching our eye. There seems to be two different forms of tower defence here, and it looks like you can switch between them. Screenshots show a map-level tower defence, where everything is zoomed out and you can take in vast swathes of the continent. Then there’s a more zoomed-in viewpoint, which takes you to the gates of your castles, watching as individual troops take to the battlefield. How these two viewpoints interrelate is interesting, and shows that Prison Games aren’t looking to produce something simplistic.
It’s also a curiosity that the tower defence genre lets you upgrade mid-battle while your enemies can’t. It hardly seems fair. In Royal Tower Defense, the enemies can evolve as a battle progresses just as you can, so there’s a nice parity that – again – will be interesting to see if it has implications for any of your strategies.
Other than these interesting little wrinkles, the back-of-the-box bulletpoints are more worrying. For a tower defence, 8 different tower upgrades is surprisingly limited, while your only enemies are orcs, which could soon get repetitive. 20 levels isn’t long for the genre and could quickly speed by, while there’s an emphasis on ‘long battles’ which isn’t necessarily what we go for in this kind of game. Sometimes shorter is punchier. We’re not sure what to make of Prison Games’s claim that the soundtrack is ‘relaxing’.
Features include:
- 8 specialized tower upgrades with unique abilities
- 20 challenging levels requiring different strategies
- Long battles which will hook you for hours
- Enemies evolving with the game progress
- Beautiful, fantasy world with relaxing music
Still, we’re fans of the genre, and are glad that we seem to be getting a glut of them recently. Let’s hope this one encourages others to come out. It’s also a budget title at £4.99, so perhaps we should be notching down our expectations a little. Keep an eye out for our full review of Royal Tower Defense on Xbox soon.
Royal Tower Defense is out now on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S and starts at £4.99 from the Xbox Store. It’s also out on Nintendo Switch.
Game Description:
Lands of orcs have expanded in the last few decades and defined new borders. New borders which are dangerously close to us… They depleted resources on their lands and it’s only a matter of time before they try to put their hands on our Kingdom. Diplomats were already sent to peacefully ask orcs to back off, but they’ve never returned. The sign was clear – there is no place for negotiations…
