Becastled

Becastled is a city-builder/tower defence game where you defend against massive hordes of enemies, siege weapons, and monsters. You gather resources, house and entertain your people, and train troops. Sadly it does none of this as well as Diplomacy Is Not An Option does. To get a couple of good bits out the way, I think the resource gathering is done very well. Mostly*. As soon as a worker is assigned to a production building, it seems to just produce. No waiting for them to arrive, or go through animations or anything. I think. See, resource income is stated at the top, but no context is given. ‘+100 sunstone’ is all it’ll say, but gives no indication about timescale. I think it’s per minute or something, but I never found a definitive answer. The big exception to this system is wood. While stone, iron, and food deposits are infinite, wood is not. Your lumberjacks have to walk to a tree, chop it down, and return to the sawmill to provide wood. This means when trees get sparse, wood production slows RIGHT down. Trees regrow every few days, but it’s still an odd anomaly. Happiness is also really easy to manage. Get some happiness buildings down, and as soon as you unlock the mansion, you’re golden. Now the less good stuff. Pathfinding, for one. It’s a common theme to mention this in Becastled reviews because...it’s a big one. Granted, pathfinding doesn’t matter for resource production, but it matters A LOT for soldiers. Groups of soldiers get caught ON EACH OTHER and get stuck (made worse by a total lack of formation options). Soldiers get caught on buildings, walls, terrain... Sometimes they stop to fight when you tell them to move away. Sometimes, and this is a really annoying one, you tell them to garrison a wall and one will just...clip through and stand in front of the wall. The game is also quite shallow. With absolutely no campaign, you’re just left with random or custom maps. Every game is essentially the same. And slow. The game is very slow. Once you’re sorted for the day, you just have to wait minutes for the night to come. No way to increase speed DESPITE LETTING US DO IT IN THE TUTORIAL. Progress is basically limited by population rate, and even with +30 happiness it takes ~30 seconds for each person to spawn. So when you’re trying to raise an army that got decimated the night before...you just have to wait and hope you get them in time. And the bugs. This game is very unpolished. Stuff like the pathfinding I’ve mentioned, but enemies can clip through walls too. I had an enemy swordsmen clip into a tower from the outside of the fortress, killing a load of archers. Numerous times my soldiers flatly wouldn’t go where I told them, instead running off to a tower or wall it thought I meant. And if you reloaded a save, it would sometimes just...not spawn some enemies. I basically accidentally glitched by way to victory on the highest difficulty because the dragon didn’t spawn on the final night. Compared to Diplomacy Is Not An Option, this game is incredibly shallow, dull, slow, and boring. To quickly compare: Diplomacy has a SHOCKINGLY engaging story and characters. Diplomacy does horde fights amazingly. There is a lot more variety in Diplomacy, with different factions, enemies, maps, objectives, and modifiers. It’s also a lot more polished than this. I have ~22 hours in Becastled because I wanted to 100% it and stop playing. I have ~100 hours in Diplomacy Is Not An Option because I absolutely loved it and couldn’t stop playing it. That’s my review.

This game has so much potential, but in just 5 hours its become unplayable for two bugs. First I lost one save because worker for some reason decided that one specific tile was unreachable. Its not a pathing issue, as other workers run through the tile constantly. Even with only a single sawmill in the middle of the otherwise empty tile, workers wouldn't use it. The second save, all buildings are unclickable. I tried everything to make them clickable, even started a brand new game and I still can't click on buildings. Sucks, I wanted to play this game.

It was not worth the wait and not the full price. It has a cute artstyle and some cool ideas but its very rough and missing many things before I'd call it a good game for 20 bucks.

An sich ein ulkiges RTS mit Gegnerhorden. Nur leider absolut unbalanced. Die ersten paar Tage zu überleben ist kein Problem. Das Problem beginnt aber sobald man sich dem Ziel des Spiels nähert. Zerstört man einen der Türme, spawnen in der Nacht Armeen die man mit seinen Einheiten nicht schlagen kann. Auch bei der Grafik wurde quasi nur das Minimum erfüllt, da wäre mehr gegangen mit den Upgrades der Gebäude.

Played for 21 hours which was enough to finish everything, including tutorial and all 39 achievements. It's a chill, laid-back castlebuilder. There are bugs and issues that are annoying, but mainly the lack of content (a story, more challenging gameplay) made this one go from a thumbs-up to a thumbs-down.

MEH! Why MEH? Because it is MEH! Mediocre. The only ranged unit are Archers. Siege weapons are bound to Towers and Towers can be only build on corners of conquered areas. You can easily cheese with Archers, peppering enemies with Arrows like there is no tomorrow. BUT! There are 2 enemy types, that are forcing you get melee units: Shieldman and Lunar Barracks. Because Shieldman negate 90% of ranged dmg and Lunar Barracks are completly immune to ranged dmg. Also, after a few hours, you got the whole game, nothing new comes anymore to surprise you, if you got plenty of arrows that is. Upgrades can be given to units with the Smithy, BUT you have to pay for EACH one of your units, meaning the Smithy grants one Archer fire arrows AT A TIME. So much and more are making this game MEH, its not really a challenge. You could turn the difficulty up, but why even do it? There is no real fun to begin with.

Abandonware - cool concept and fun but its just not that deep

game crashed and my saved game files are also gone with all my process

Amazing game. It needs more content though.

10x better than Clash of Clans, super enjoyable and not ridiculously time consuming to progress- also not an easy game. It has genuinely challenging aspects like resource consumption and time consumption management. It takes some-what careful planning and a lot of foresight to build out your town/city/fortress. And there's a ton of content and a large tech tree (that will hopefully be expanded upon further).