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Thronefall is a strategy game, but not like any other I have played before. I must say that my love for the game started when I watched the trailer: an honest, to the point short video explaining what the game is about with gameplay footage, which is incredibly rare nowadays, as silly as it sounds. So I will also recommend watching that if you want something in addition to this review to help make you a decision.

The game has a lot of tower defense elements, but with a bit of management and real time strategy sprinkled in. Each level starts with you on an empty land and your goal is to create and defend your little kingdom until the waves of enemies stop coming. There are two really distinct stages to the gameplay: the day, when you plan your economy and defenses, which doesn’t have a timer, meaning you can plan as much and as slowly as you want to, and the night, when the enemies come and you’ll defend your castle. Each successful night creates a checkpoint so you don’t have to redo the whole level in case you fail.

There are many different ways to play the game. You can pick different weapons, buildings, perks, mutators and make your own plan about how to get enough economy to build your defenses and what these defenses will be. You can focus on towers and play it like a tower defense game, you can focus on units and command your big army during the nights and you can also focus on your own character and become unstoppable, along with many in-betweens.

A weapon must be chosen at the start of each level and they are activated passively while around enemies, with even ranged choices. Each weapon also has an active ability which takes a few seconds to recharge, depending on the ability. These can be quite powerful and enhance your strategy even if it’s not completely related to the weapon choice, so there are a few important choices to be made even if you don’t plan on having your character fight the enemies directly.

Perks are passive modifiers to your character, buildings, economy, units or even game mechanics. There are currently 54 perks in the game, and you can choose up to 5 for each level and it’s a ton of fun mixing and matching them to find your own preferred way to defend the kingdom. There are many options to boost your economy, so you might want to pick one of these to get a boost and get stronger faster. Some of them let you recover from mistakes so the gameplay can be more relaxing if you wish. A lot of them will improve a really specific offensive or defensive tool at your disposal. They are presented really well too, incorporated into a progression system that unlocks them as you play the game, so you’ll never feel overwhelmed and also get incentivized to revisit played levels and play them differently.

There are also quite a few different buildings, with up to 4 upgrades available for each one of them. So you can specialize your towers so that they snipe enemies from far away or they barrage enemies nearby. All the units also have variety, having 4 different choices for melee units, ranged units and the hero unit which you can only have one of per building. The upgrade system is really fun and can really change how you play the game, which is something I deeply appreciate. The buildings go in predetermined spots, meaning you can’t build anything anywhere, so there is more adaptation to be had instead of focusing on only one aspect of your defense or offense.

All levels will give you a score depending on how you play, and this arcade-like implementation is amazing. You’ll see the score changing after every wave, and it clearly tells you what it considers for scoring: a flat amount for surviving, percentage of total buildings defended, and a time bonus to reward quickly clearing the waves. At the end of the level there there is another modifier to your score: if you didn’t need to use the checkpoint to go back a day at any point during that level, you’ll get a score boost, incentivizing no-restart runs while also not being a multiplier that huge which would invalidate other attempts to get a high score. There’s a simple leaderboard on every level so you can see how well your friends did, and as a competitive person I really enjoy that, and have some high scores to challenge you with, in case you end up playing the game.

There is actually one more mechanic that can boost the score: the mutators. This is where things get really interesting if you’re like me and enjoy a challenging game. Mutators are challenging passive effects that will either lower your capacity to defend or make your enemies more powerful, for a sweet reward of a score multiplier at the end of the level. There are 18 total and you can pick up as many as you want, as long as you can handle them, which is something really hard when they stack on top of each other. So to get a really high score, you’ll really have to endure a lot of mutators.

This concept is presented at side objectives available on each level, which require a specific combination of weapon type, perks and mutators to complete. This is a really good introduction to the system, since it amps the difficulty significantly and shows pretty soon that there is a lot more to do in this game aside from clearing the levels once, which are easy, so the challenge is really welcome.

I love how enemies are designed in this game. There are a lot of different enemies and they each have their own characteristics, such as behavior, strengths and weaknesses. The wave composition highlights this, grouping them in ways that can give the group a unique characteristic resulting from their own, meaning dealing with them will have a different solution than each group of the same enemy on their own.

Another brilliance of game design is displaying the amount of each type of enemy in a certain wave even before you reach that. From wave 1 you can easily read about the enemies on the pause menu and look at what the next waves are gonna look like composition-wise, so you can plan ahead and not be surprised by a sudden hard counter to your strategy. There is also indication of where the enemies will spawn, since the levels have multiple entry points, which is important for planning a more focused strategy.

Aside from the highly replayable ten available levels, there is a well implemented endless mode with a twist: it’s not an endless level, but a progression system which starts with short levels and gets harder every time, while letting the player pick the next level and some perks that come with it. So as the levels get harder, the player gathers more perks and can deal with stronger enemies. This is a much more interesting way to have a meaningful endless mode, since the easy way of doing it on a single level wouldn’t be as interactive and wouldn’t require adapting your strategies as much, since decisions are final during each level. There are also 15 more challenges that put a different spin on game mechanics which are all really fun too.

With the charming art style, great base mechanics that make the game highly replayable, the gameplay as easy or as hard as you want it to be, the fun arcade experience and many different challenges to tackle, I highly recommend Thronefall if you're looking for a unique strategy game experience.