Thronefall Review

The name Thronefall sounds to me like a prestige HBO drama starring Jeremy Irons as a grizzled old patriarch, but actually it's the title of a small, beautifully constructed tower defence game. While not especially deep, it's a very pleasant way to spend a few hours, and a good pick for those who like the idea of a more relaxing take on this often frenetic genre.

Perhaps the game's most immediately notable feature is its art style: Thronefall uses cell-shaded visuals with a restrained colour palette. The first level has you fend off critters on pastel green fields bordered by grey rocks and yellow cotton candy trees. Later there are orange deserts, snow levels with icy pools, and spooky forests full of spindly black trees. The landscapes and castle layouts you have to work with grow slowly more intricate throughout the campaign, but the visuals remain simple and stylish. You can change the colour palette at any moment with a single button press, which is a fun feature even if the results sometimes look a bit strange (purple snow, anyone?). The music is excellent, albeit there aren't many tracks so you'll be hearing the same ones a lot. The sound effects are also well done, from the satisfying thunk as you place down a building, to the horn that sounds to rally your troops as you prepare to face the night.

You'll control a character on horseback with a passive attack which fires automatically (a bow, to begin with) and an active attack on a cooldown timer. The game alternates between day time, when you build up your castle and its defences, and night, when enemies attack. You'll start with a castle centre around which you'll build other structures: economic buildings, like houses, mines, and windmills, which grant gold every day as long as they survive the night; army buildings like barracks and archery ranges that add soldiers to your army; and defensive buildings like towers and walls.

Unlike most tower defence games, you don't get to decide where to place any of your buildings. Instead, they are erected on predefined nodes that only accept one specific type of building. You can press a button to show ghostly outlines of all the buildings currently available to you, and you can upgrade the castle centre to get more nodes. It often makes sense to throw down a lot of economic buildings early on, when they could potentially give you gold every day for the rest of the match, but this only works if you create enough defences to ensure they survive the night. The game forewarns you what type of enemies you're about to face and where they will spawn, so you'll always know where to place your defences (the final waves of each level throw enemies at you from all directions, naturally).

This approach makes the game a breeze to play, and results in beautiful castles that slot satisfyingly into place with the surrounding landscape, but what's gained in aesthetics and ease of play is lost when it comes to creativity and freedom. You just don't have that many options when it comes to curating your defences, and I think this will limit Thronefall's appeal among those looking for a more intense strategic challenge.

Don't get me wrong: there is still some strategising to be done. For example, you can choose to evolve your towers into different types, such as sniper towers or bunker towers. You can also choose to spawn different types of friendly soldiers, such as longbowman or fire archers, knights or berserkers, and you can arrange your soldiers how you like around your castle and order them around mid-battle. This ended up being my favourite part of the game. While still not exactly deep, you'll need to make sure you have enough forces defending different approaches to your castle, ideally ones that work well against the type of enemies heading that way. Aerial threats can be a particular nuisance, as only archers and towers are capable of taking them down.

In later levels, you'll gain access to more interesting buildings. There are shrines that grant gold and attack enemies once enough foes have died near them, and which grow more powerful the larger your shrine network becomes. There are temples that grant powerful one-shot modifiers that usually come with an interesting risk-reward trade off. For instance, you can choose to sacrifice your whole army at the beginning of the night in exchange for having your soldiers respawn at a dramatically faster rate than they would otherwise. Summoning circles allow you to summon more enemies for the next fight, allowing you to potentially earn more gold as long as you don't bite off more than you can chew.

As you progress through Thronefall's ten levels, you'll unlock new weapons for your main character, as well as a wide range of perks and ‘mutations' that convey various bonuses or penalties. The boss at the end of the final level proved a stiff challenge, but otherwise I breezed through the campaign with the standard settings, so most players will want to get acquainted with the mutations (unless you want a purely zen experience — a valid choice). There are crowns to be won for completing levels with predefined sets of perks and mutations. There's also an endless mode where you pick from a choice of three weapons that each come with two perks, and play through shorter levels with successively tougher waves of randomised enemies. After surviving a level, you get to choose a new weapon and perk combo, and the perks stack with the previous ones, allowing you to gradually fashion a powerful build as the game ramps up the challenge.

My main gripe with Thronefall — and it's not a huge one — is that fighting foes using your mounted main character lacks crunch. Even when zooming in the camera, it's often unclear which enemies your attacks are connecting with when using a melee build. Some of the attacks are quite fun — I enjoyed laying down traps or casting lightning bolts — but the cooldown on most attack skills felt very slow, at least for my liking. Movement is also a bit floaty. Much of the time, combat amounted to charging into a baying horde of beasties, setting off my active attack, then retreating and cooling my heels for a while until my attack was ready to use again and my health had regenerated. There's nothing wrong with this exactly, but I couldn't help but wish that direct combat had a bit more bite, especially since most other games in the genre don't typically have this element.

Some will find this to be an overly simplistic take on tower defence, but, notwithstanding my grumbles about the floatiness of combat, I've enjoyed Thronefall for what it is. As long as you are happy to accept the game on its own terms — with its baked-in and very much intentional limitations — you're likely to have a good time for the six or seven hours it takes to run through the levels with the default settings. If you mix in mutators to make the game harder, and work towards obtaining all the crowns, the game could last for dozens of hours — all in good value for just $12/£10.99.

I've felt many things while playing tower defence games in the past — mainly stress, followed by brief bouts of relief after surviving a tough wave of enemies. But Thronefall is the first time I've sat back as my cell-shaded fire archers, berserkers, and ballista towers take chunks out of an invading army, and thought: well, doesn't that look lovely?