Developer: WILD WITS GAMES
Publisher: Curve Games
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Sovereign Tower – Review
It’s often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. When a game is a runaway success, it occasionally spawns an entire genre: we’ve seen countless Souls-likes, Vampire Survivors-likes and even Balatro-likes. One thing we didn’t expect to see though, was a Dispatch-like. Sovereign Tower happens to be just that. Can the game convince us that it is more than just Dispatch with knights instead of superheroes?
Story
The story of Sovereign Tower follows the newly appointed Sovereign (that’s you!). The titular tower has chosen you to be the new ruler of the kingdom, right after an opposing empire has invaded and burned your home. Guided by a talking statue and your new advisor, Arlin, you host a Round Table of eccentric knights, hear petitions from subjects, build alliances with neighboring counties, and manage international relations. As if you don’t have enough on your plate already, there’s also a dark demon with time-rewinding abilities trapped in the tower’s crypts. It all adds up to a plot exploring the themes of ethics, existential dread, leadership and the heavy consequences of altering timelines. Overall, Sovereign Tower’s writing contains a lot of heart, humour and depth, although tone isn’t always consistent and even occasionally clashes as the prose shifts abruptly between evocative medieval-style writing and more modern-style speech.
Graphics
Visually, Sovereign Tower is a delight, with its gorgeous character designs, manuscript-style maps and soft, medieval-inspired colour palette. The sprites for the game’s cast feature expressive, artfully dishevelled portraits that reinforce their personalities. Animation is unfortunately limited, with character interactions mostly using still frames and static poses. Character emotions are conveyed through expressive sprite variations rather than through fluid animations. The upside of this is that performance is smooth, with no visual bugs, severe frame rate drops of loading issues in sight.
Sound
The music does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to setting the right atmosphere. Sovereign Tower’s soundtrack features several thematically appropriate instrumental tracks and an occasional vocal track. Unfortunately, vocals are limited to the soundtrack only, and voice acting is entirely absent. Ambient sound design mostly consists of environmental cues that are fitting for the game’s setting, alongside sound effects that provide feedback for the game’s UI and quest management actions.
Gameplay
At its core, Sovereign Tower is a lightweight management sim, albeit one that heavily blends in visual novel-style storytelling. Rather than complex city building or economic simulation, the game focuses on roster and task management. You manage the kingdom’s treasury, keep five socio-political factions happy, and carefully match individual knights to timed quests based on their stats, equipment, and personality traits. However, because the outcome of these systems is primarily driven by the written dialogue and predetermined story events, the pure management layer is fairly simple. It’s in this regard that Sovereign Tower’s gameplay feels the closest to that of Dispatch.
Each in-game day follows a structured, multi-phase cycle that balances kingdom diplomacy with knight management. Your morning begins in the throne room, where you hold an audience with your subjects as well as diplomats and rival rulers. It’s there that you field requests, manage faction reputations, and acquire new quests. In the afternoon, you head to the Round Table where you manage your roster of knights. You must review each quest’s specific requirements and match them against your knights’ attributes, gear and personal traits. Some knights have specific food likes, for example, while others may have a fear of the dark. Knights have upgradeable base stats, items and hidden attributes that affect both mission success and loyalty. You can find out these traits through tower facilities or also by just spending time with them. Once you have dispatched (hah!) your knights, you advance the clock, allowing quests to resolve over several days. Crucially, if a mission fails, a deadline is missed or a knight dies, you can make a deal with the demon trapped in your crypt to rewind time to a previous day. Retaining your knowledge of future events unlocks brand-new dialogue choices and tactical paths to alter the realm’s fate, creating a loop of ongoing trial, management, and time manipulation.
Despite Sovereign Tower’s narrative-driven nature, the game has a surprisingly high replay value, thanks to randomly pulled audience events, branching faction paths and a NG+ Mode. A single playthrough takes roughly 16 hours, including time rewinding. You can’t see everything the game has to offer in just one run, so you’re getting plenty of bang for that €19.99 RRP. If you’re looking for something more challenging, Sovereign Tower has you covered as well: the so-called Sovereign Mode disables manual saves, forcing you to live with your choices. Managing quests, strict deadlines and major confrontation thresholds really ramp up the difficulty. Our only gripe with Sovereign Tower’s gameplay is that the campaign ends very abruptly, leaving unfinished side quests hanging. This is something that becomes less egregious on subsequent playthroughs when you’re aware of what is coming, but it did catch us off-guard during that first run.
Conclusion
If you enjoyed deploying a dysfunctional team of heroes based on their quirks and stats in Dispatch, you’ll be happy to learn that Sovereign Tower scratches the exact same ‘logistics puzzle’ itch. However, Sovereign Tower trades out Dispatch’s modern comedy and voiced animation for a deeper progression system and an explicit time travel rewind mechanic. Although Sovereign Tower couldn’t entirely make us forget Dispatch, there was enough here to at least make us feel that the game could stand on its own legs instead of leaning on the shoulders of its main inspiration.
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