Castle Story: Early Access Report
In Castle Story you’re tasked with protecting your crystal from waves of rampaging monsters called Corruptrons. Using your jelly baby-esque minions called Bricktons you must gather various resources to build a castle and defend against the hordes for as long as possible. Where it differs from other base building strategy games is its robust construction tools which enables you to place and stack building blocks in an almost LEGO-like manner.
In the current build the game’s basics are all there and mostly functional but the accoutrements for long-term play aren’t.
Your standard castle building blocks are present and correct allowing for walls, stairs, doors plus resource storage points to be erected. The wheel-based menu system and heads up display are also solid and well-designed meaning it’s very easy to pick up and play even without a tutorial.
Unfortunately, after you’ve got a decent fortress built and successfully held out against a few waves the game plateaus. This is mostly due to the current limitations of the enemy forces – while they increase in number with every wave, there’s only one basic enemy class whose sole tactic seems to be barrelling headlong toward your crystal or whichever Brickton is nearest.
The game uses a voxel-based engine with dynamic physics but aside from tumbling objects and rag-dolling corpses it isn’t utilised in any way meaningful to game play.
This lack of variety means that – assuming you’ve been using any kind of common sense in your base design and Brickton deployment – there’s very little challenge to be had. It doesn’t take long to leap above the difficulty curve and the experience quickly becomes boring, enabling you to easily maintain a fully-built castle and have a surplus of resources, therefore leaving you nothing to do between waves. The harder difficulty option doesn’t make much of a difference either, apparently only slightly bolstering the number of enemies per wave.
Outside of this main survival mode is sandbox which allows you to build in whatever way you want without the threat of enemy incursions. However, besides a more deformable map it doesn’t feel fleshed out either. Hopefully this mode will be greatly expanded in later builds, ideally providing options for infinite resources and workers to allow players to get the most out of the game’s tools.
The game provides an uncommon blend of genres that I haven’t seen used outside of the Stronghold games.
There’s also a multiplayer option available from its title screen though the match set up system is either in a nascent state or is more complicated than it lets on as I wasn’t able to start or find a match. If it’s intended to be a competitive mode – perhaps with one or more teams playing as the Corruptrons – I could see this being a very meaningful addition.
Each presently available mode has only one map, further limiting the current package. Presumably this is the one aspect that will definitely be expanded over time. A world editor mode is also on the way, hopefully allowing players to create their own scenarios.
Castle Story clearly has the potential for greatness but the current build – despite having sturdy foundations in place – is simply starved for content. Given its hefty £15 Steam or £12.49 Humble Store prices tags I can’t recommend it at the moment. I’d advise waiting at least until more elements and modes are properly implemented or when it winds up vastly reduced in another Steam sale.
Verdict: Wait and See
Version played:
v. 0.1.2.a1b8, released February 2014
Stability/Bugs:
Very stable. Some frame rate drop during the higher, larger enemy waves. Catapults and stepladders tend to bug out of existence when built but these are minor objects.
