Developer: Laser Guided Games
Publisher: Laser Guided Games
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Golem Gates – Preview
Golem Gates in an interesting merge between three genres: A deck-building game, real time strategy, and a MOBA. The game is being developed and will be published by Laser Guided Games. Golem Gates is planned to be released early 2018.
The story of Golem gates is mainly being told in the single player campaign, which will not be out until the official release of the full game. The description of the game on its steam page does reveal some of the background story:
You play as a harbringer, a powerful creature which can control nanites (nano-bots) that cover the surface of the post-apocalyptic world where you reside. Your powers grant you the ability to summon troops wherever you want as long as the area is visible to you, create buildings, use powerful attacks, or enhance your troops. You battle a mysterious ancient enemy which spawns hostile warrior machines into your world using ‘golem gates’.
The graphics of Golem Gates look rather awesome for a MOBA-type game, and the game has really impressive sound effects and awesome, epic music. The color scheme is rather dark, but that fits the grim post-apocalyptic setting. The graphics are very detailed and the units look really cool and unique. Most of the map is obscured by a ‘fog of war’; only the area in the line of sight of your units and structures will be visible. This is an interesting mechanic, since you can only spawn units within the line of sight of other units, and if they die you’ll lose your sight at that location.
Golem Gates is a fusion between a deck-building game, real-time strategy, and a MOBA. It’s a strategy game where your main goal is to control objectives, and kill the enemy harbringer, which is like a hero unit that stays at the rear line, well defended. If your harbringer dies, you lose the match. The moves available to you are drawn from a deck, and you can use them if you have enough energy.
You have Glyphs in your arsenal which are basically cards. You can collect these by finishing battles, and then use them in your deck, or forge them using the resources you’ll earn after matches. You’ll get glyphs from your deck in your hand at a regular interval as long as your harbringer is stationary, and you can have up to 10 glyphs in your hand to use. There are glyphs which summon a number of troops, glyphs which can build a trap or turret, or glyphs which give you a powerful ability to use on the battlefield, either a damaging strike or a boost to your troops. Besides using glyphs the harbringer has a special ability to summon a temporary unit which can scout the battlefield to locate the enemy harbringer.
There can be any number of glyphs in your deck with a maximum of 60 glyphs, which you will draw randomly during the match. After you have used your entire deck, you’ll be able to re-use the deck, after a 15 seconds cooldown during which your character won’t be usable so you won’t be able to cast spells or command your troops. Anything can happen during this cooldown because the game won’t be paused and the battle goes on, so be careful to time your re-shuffle well!
Using glyphs will consume energy, which is your most limiting resource. Energy regenerates slowly, but this regain can be sped up by controlling points. A battle map contains several important objectives which you need to conquer. These control points are usually energy generators, which speeds up your energy regeneration, and this determines the speed at which you can use your glyphs. As you can imagine, controlling as many points as possible is essential to win a game. There are also super-units you’ll be able to battle and control, but these are pretty unnecessary to win a game.
Troops have a line of sight where you can spawn new troops or build structures. It’s important to have some structures on or near objectives, in order to keep an eye on that area and to spawn more troops at that location if it gets attacked. The sight radius of the units are rather small, so most of the battlefield will be obscured. You can only cast spells within line of sight, and powerful AOE spells like fireballs will damage both the enemies and your own troops, so you’ll need to position those really carefully, or be ready to sacrifice your own units.
Golem Gates is geared towards multiplayer matches, and has an online matchmaking system. However, there are not that many players of the game as of yet. So you’ll usually fight an AI opponent, unless you want to wait for a very long time until another player pops up. Luckily, the AI fights are pretty challenging, and especially when still unfamiliar with the game it’s a great way to learn the strategies of battle and collect some more glyphs for your deck.
The single player campaign is not available as of yet, but will be implemented very soon according to the developers. In the multiplayer mode there are a lot of different types of gameplay and match types to choose from. You can play a duel versus another player, 2 vs 2, or a 4 player free-for-all arena. You can also choose to battle versus AI, which can have different strategies you can choose before the match: turtle, balanced or rush tactics, and random. You’ll be able to select the difficulty and the number of opponents you’ll play against, or even form a team. There are many different map layouts to choose from when battling against an AI, and you can choose what kind of decks the AI uses. Next to these versus-options are also co-op games, in which you’ll need to survive against an AI enemy alone or with another player.
Conclusion
Golem Gates has a really interesting concept and looks very promising. This game will be a lot of fun for people who love to play relatively fast matches and use tactical deck-building skills, smart placement of structures, and proper energy and glyph management. It’s a challenging game with a novel concept.
Golem Gates - Preview,
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[…] Laser Guided Games celebrates the upcoming release of Golem Gates their Action strategy card-battler with a nice launch trailer. Sometimes you want to try something new and you order an espresso tonic in your local bar and sometimes you mix action-strategy and card battler gameplay in a fantasy post-apocalyptic Sci-Fi mix. To put it simply, you deploy troop and buildings on the battlefield like you would in Magic or Hearthstone by playing a card from your hand but instead of them being cards on the table you control them like you would in a strategy game. The game will launch on PlayStation 4 on May 29th, then on Xbox One and Nintendo Switch on May 31st. You can find our preview right here. […]
[…] One and Nintendo Switch. Golem Gates is an action-strategy card-game hybrid, which we have already previewed a while […]