Thronefall Review — Tower Defense (With a Lot of Twists)

If you’ve been reading my reviews, you’ll know by now that I’m a big fan of games with wave survival mechanics. I’m particularly fond of city-building games where you have to defend your town against monsters (see Cataclismo or Diplomacy Is Not an Option for recent examples). I’m also not opposed to occasionally indulging in a classic tower defense game. Thronefall, on the surface, is one of these classic tower defense titles; however, it hides a layer of depth below the surface that only gradually reveals itself to you as you play, surprising you more and more as you conquer its handful of levels.

Thronefall opens with a straightforward tutorial that quickly explains the game’s fundamentals. You are given a king and a castle, with a set number of enemy waves to survive. Complete each wave without losing your castle, and you pass the level. Each of the game’s levels is presented as a region on a world map, each featuring a unique layout of placeable structures and its own challenges to overcome.

Like most tower defense games, you play a balancing game between defensive structures and economy. Houses and some special buildings like Gold Mines or Harbors produce gold before the start of each wave, allowing you to build or upgrade towers or unit-producing buildings to survive the next onslaught. You can’t place buildings wherever you’d like, with each map having a unique layout and predetermined spots where each building can be built, making for a strategic puzzle game as you figure out the best building placement on each map.

Thronefall does something unique for the genre by giving you control of your own character. The aforementioned king is a player-controlled character that can fight alongside and command the placement of your AI troops. This gives you a more active role and more options when tackling wave defense, especially when we get to the game’s level modifiers.

One of the more interesting aspects of Thronefall has to be the amount of customization available before you start a level. As you complete levels, you earn XP, which unlocks new weapons for your king, positive modifiers, and negative mutations that tip the scales in your favor or against it, respectively.

These factors can dramatically alter the way you play the game. The positive modifiers, in particular, can be anything from a simple boost to your gold income or wall health to a perk that utterly guts your king’s damage while significantly increasing the power of your troops, turning you into more of a commander or RTS player than an active combatant. The negative mutations, on the other hand, can range from decreasing the gold dropped by enemies to making walls and towers nearly useless.

The positive modifiers come with no downsides (generally speaking), and players are only allowed to equip up to five of them in a level. Mutations, on the other hand, are straight difficulty increases, and you can take as many as you want, giving a bonus to the amount of XP earned for each one you enable. I usually find myself tackling a level with three to four of them for a 168% XP increase.

Weapons are also unlocked through XP, which dramatically changes the active element of your king unit. Your default weapon, the bow and arrow with a dagger, gives you a simple ranged attack and a melee option for up close, while later unlocks can be Area of Effect (AOE) attacks or chaining lightning to clear huge hordes of foes.

It is really impressive just how many options are available to unlock as you play the game, giving each level an almost infinite amount of replayability as you tackle them again and again with new twists on the rules. Each level also has a set of challenges available, asking you to tackle it with certain modifiers, mutations, or weapons enabled for an added challenge.

These are all additions to the already solid gameplay, which has to be one of, if not the best, straight tower defense game I’ve played. Thronefall’s base gameplay is rich with variety, from the buildings and units you can field to the enemies attacking your castle.

Something I particularly enjoy is how the game handles building upgrades. Most buildings, when upgraded, offer you a list of available mutations to how the building functions, be they perks that affect you or your army or straight changes to the stats and function of the building. Since each building can usually be upgraded multiple times, and there are a handful of upgrades each time, you can mix and match different combinations of powers to really customize the function of buildings in your base.

The game features an honestly staggering number of enemies, gradually introduced over each level you complete. Frankly, I lost count of the number of enemies introduced and often found myself having to retry a level because I didn’t anticipate what was coming at me next. When the game started throwing boss fights at me three levels in, I learned to stop trying to anticipate the surprises in store for me with Thronefall and accept that the game was going to keep me on my toes.

Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Thronefall is available on Steam.