Developer: MossTech Studio
Publisher: Indienova
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Guardians of Holme – Review
Nearly a decade ago, tower defense games were all the rage, especially browser-based versions. Sadly, along the way, the genre lost some of its popularity, probably because of the many crappy titles out there. Now, developers are treading the waters again with original takes on the genre, such as the recently released Bish Bash Bots. Today, however, we’ll be taking a closer look at Guardians of Holme, a tower defense game with deck-building and roguelike mechanics. While a bit rough around the edges, we still had a great time with this one.
Story
Guardians of Holme has no real story present during the gameplay. Each playable character has a simple bio, and your enemies drop a few one-liners here and there, but there is no real overarching narrative that ties things together. As this is a roguelike tower defense game with card game mechanics, we weren’t really expecting a captivating story.
Graphics
All in all, the game doesn’t look bad. You’ll be treated to a 2D top-down tower defense title somewhat reminiscent of older Flash browser titles in the same genre. The enemy design is decent, as well as the overall trap design. The enemy variety is fairly limited, but what’s present looks good, and having too many enemies in the game would make it too hard to memorize their attack patterns. The maps look a bit bland after a while, as there is also very little variety.
We mainly had an issue with the game’s UI. The UI looks dated at best and often fails to give the player the necessary information. We noticed awkward sentences in descriptions, overlapping text, and even missing information. Some towers don’t accurately tell you the range, which is sometimes a bit annoying. This issue was also noticeable during the gameplay.
Sound
The sound is serviceable. You’ll be able to enjoy a fairly dramatic and action-packed soundtrack, which sadly is limited when it comes to track variety. The music also tends to loop really quickly, which does get annoying during longer play sessions. A few more tunes would have certainly been welcome here. The SFX are decent and provide proper audio feedback.
Gameplay
Guardians of Holme is a fairly traditional tower defense title that tries to spice things up with card game mechanics in a roguelike format. You’ll pick a mode you want to play through with the character of your choosing, and you’re good to go. In the game, you’ll play through short stages to unlock new cards, level your traps or skills, and earn a bit of money. To unlock new modes, you’ll have to beat the normal mode once first. To unlock new characters and their passive upgrades, you’ll have to play for a while to be rewarded with gems, which you can then use to unlock them. Each of the characters also has their own set of traps, which is a nice touch. It’s all pretty straightforward, even with the sometimes subpar UI.
We did very much enjoy the short stage setup as it allowed us to play the game in short bursts, and it also actively tracked our progress to continue where we left off when ending our play session. In each stage, you’ll have materials at your disposal, which you use to place your traps. When you kill enemies during the waves, you’ll earn extra materials to place additional traps or to upgrade existing ones. You can also place barriers on the field, actively changing the route of the enemy invaders. These barriers are ignored by flying enemies, however, and they can still be destroyed by other units as well. At the end of a run, you’ll be awarded experience for your chosen character, as well as gems. If you then invest some gems in the three available characters, their traps will gradually get stronger, making subsequent runs easier.
As mentioned above, the game fails to properly communicate what range certain traps have, especially when placing them. You can often look up certain traps when you acquire them, and then you see a small roster for their range, but you get no visual feedback when actually playing the game. When a trap is placed, you can hover over it to see its range, but you won’t be able to undo your placement action without losing some materials and losing the trap in the progress as well. After a while, we knew what all the traps did, and how we best placed them, but it was still annoying every time we unlocked a few new traps.
We did find that the game was a bit unpolished. This was in part due to the lousy UI and the lack of showing the range of the different traps, but also due to minor bugs. More than once we had a few skills not registering properly, a few relics not triggering, and even dead enemies not despawning on the map. Our Alchemist Mark Trap was sometimes stuck in an attack loop, even when there were no more enemies on the map. We had to constantly change the Rally Point when this happened to end the current wave.
All in all, the overall gameplay loop is very enjoyable and addictive, but after a few runs, you’ll have seen what the game has to offer. Guardians of Holme does try to spice things up with Daily Challenges and an Endless Mode, which do add a bit of longevity to the mix. Even so, we reckon that most people who pick this one up will play a few lengthy sessions during their first few days with the game, to then only revisit the title in between other bigger games. This is, of course, not a bad thing.
Conclusion
Guardians of Holme is a fun, simple tower defense game with a few original twists and turns that make it stand out from the competition. While we spent quite a few hours with the game, it did end up becoming fairly repetitive and there were still many rough edges to be seen. We do hope that the game does get a bit more polish during the coming months, as well as a bit more map variety and some additional content. Even so, if you’re looking for a solid tower defense experience with a high dose of RNG, we can easily recommend this one.
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