Build your hero and defend your town in Legend of Towercraft, a free-to-play tower defense game with ARPG elements. Play as a fighter, magician, or builder. Customize your talents, craft items, and combine set bonuses. Put your stats into turrets, skills, or just delivering a good wallop!

Format: PC via Steam or Android via Google Play
Play time so far: 4 hours

Released June 5th, 2020 by Martin Bartsch, Stephanie Senjuty Bartsch | Martin Bartsch

Quick Overview

Daily challenges are also available

In-depth Review

Legend of Towercraft is a tower defense game with action RPG elements. Play as a fighter, magician, or builder for unique access to talents and skills. Some items may also have class restrictions, but collecting a matched set offers increasing bonuses such as resistances, more coins, dodge chance, energy regen, and more!

Three starting classes

There’s a fairly large progression tree for the different types of towers. Archer towers excel in attacking quickly with smaller attacks. Boulder towers have stronger attacks at a lower attack rate and can deal AOE. Sniper towers specialize in long-range attacks at a decreased rate of fire. And lastly are support towers, which are the first to greatly diverge in their upgrade paths, doing everything from slowing enemies to increasing fire rates of towers to healing the player. Top tier progressions for towers introduce effects such as frenzy, multishot, poison, stun, armor penetration or destruction, and invisibility disruption.

Mix of towers for a mix of enemies

There are a limited number of spaces on the map where towers can be built. In general, these are small pockets of three or four. Sometimes there are one-offs or large clusters of six or seven, so the player doesn’t have a full grid to work with. Paths for the enemies tend to be fairly winding and conjoin without any symmetry. Towers can also be removed for some amount of refund gold in order to build something new in its place. On some maps, additional locations to put towers can be prepared for an additional cost of gold, but many maps do not have this.

Map that allows clearing land for new turrets

Most of the maps in Legend of Towercraft have multiple entrances for enemies to advance through. Each location is completed multiple times at increasing difficulty levels in which the map continues to expand. New types of monsters and a greater number of monsters are usually introduced at higher levels. There are a lot of diverse enemies, some of which have unique effects such as: flat damage reduction shields, high movement speed, summoning more enemies, or attacking the player from almost all the way across the map.

For scale, this is about half a top tier starter map

If the player is ever struggling with one location, they can usually go to a different place in the campaign, because the campaign is nonlinear. Players can progress against one type of enemy until they hit a roadblock and then switch to another location and another type of enemy. Here they can gather other equipment and resources along with experience before returning to where they got stuck.

Beginning world map

Gold is the currency for within a level and is earned by slain enemies or electing to take an enemy wave earlier than it would normally be released. Within an enemy wave, enemies do not come all at once but may be spread out into smaller sub-waves. Enemies from prior waves to not have to be entirely eliminated before new waves can be brought in.

Gold is used for building and upgrading towers

Towers do not stand in front of enemies and they do not prevent them from passing nor do they have health bars. The player and any temporary constructions that the player creates do have health bars and enemies will aggro to them. Both enemies and the player are restricted to always being on the path and cannot take shortcuts between the towers.

Neither player nor enemies can pass through the towers to access the path before they officially join

Legend of Towercraft was originally a mobile game. The developers brought it over to PC by fan request, and it is currently in early access while they iron out some issues. One of the things I feel was probably leftover from the mobile version is there’s a separate registration. I assume that this is so that players can play on either mobile or desktop and have their progress sync between the two.

Registration is necessary to play

There are also some parts of the interface that I thought were un-intuitive, mostly through lack of explanation. For instance, I received a crafting recipe to be able to teach to the wizard tower in my town, which would allow me to craft runes. There was no description in the game of what ruins would do for me. When I entered my wizard tower, I was unable to get them to learn the recipe, despite clicking all over parts of the UI. I ended up taking a gamble that my wizard tower needed to be increased in level, sunk a bunch of currency into that, and was eventually able to teach the recipe to my wizard’s tower. Then looking at the runes, of which there are three possible options to craft, it didn’t give me any details on what they were and what they would do. I randomly selected one to build to try to test it out, only to find that it appeared to be meant for the magicians class instead of what I was playing, which was a builder.

It’s unclear what creating runes will do

Recommendation

Overall. I very much enjoyed Legend of Towercraft. I liked the idea that I could play it both on mobile and on my computer. I loved all of the different options to customize the character, be it through class, talents, skills, or items. I liked the nonlinear campaign, allowing the player to experience different enemies instead of staying on the level for an extended period of time. I very much enjoyed the expanding maps and different enemies. But I did have a couple of problems with the explanations of the interface and the necessity for separate registration will likely seem odd for players coming from Steam. I recommend Legend of Towercraft for players who enjoy tower defense games and particular are interested in the ARPG elements.