Here’s a complete review of Rodent Games’s upcoming title, Artificer’s Tower, where you get to build your own Wizard colony from scratch.
If you’re a fan of colony-building games such as Fallout Shelter or This War of Mine, keep your eyes peeled for Rodent Games’s Artificer’s Tower. Releasing on April 18th, the game will take you on a magical journey to build your very own Wizard Academy of sorts!
Craft your own mystical ingredients, train future wizards, and sell your wares to towns as you earn gold, expand your colony, and protect yourself against random attacks from orcs and monsters. The idea is pretty interesting, but is it worth your money?
Luckily for you, we got our hands on an early copy of the game and did the research.
Here’s our complete review of Artificer’s Tower to help you better decide if you want to pick it up. Let’s get started.
Start at the Basics
Artificer’s Tower is a colony management sim. The core gameplay loop here is to build your own colony from scratch. You start with three randomly generated Wizards and a Foyer module when you boot up a new game.
The game comes with a nice, in-depth tutorial that teaches you all the basics, like managing your wizards, building the essential modules like the Fabrica, Essence Reaper, etc, and managing your resources. If you haven’t played games like this before, we strongly recommend playing the tutorial first.
As you grow and expand your colony, new Wizards will start joining your ranks. You can assign each of these Wizards to different stations, depending on whether you want to prioritize crafting, bartering, or enchanting. Or, you could just leave them to do their own thing, and they’ll move around your tower, pitching in wherever there’s work.
Happiness is one of the main goals in Artificer’s Tower. The happier your Mages are, the faster they’ll work. To keep them happy, you need to give them proper food, water, and make sure they have a nice place to sleep, among other things.
At the end of each night, you’ll get a Daily Report giving you a detailed highlight of resources you’ve earned, sold, or have in stock.
Pick Your Mages – Choosing Your Starting Wizards
When you start a new game, you first need to choose three Mages for your colony. These are given at random, but you can click the refresh button to generate another random wizard with different perks and stats.
The stat distribution for the Mages determines their specialty. Here are the six main stats in the game and how they affect the Mages.
- W: Stands for Wit. Affects Fabricating, Combat Experts, and Advanced Munitions
- I: Stands for Intuition. Affects Alchemy, Basic Combat, and Scrying
- Z: Stands for Zeal. Affects Researching and Administration
- A: Stands for Allure. Affects Teaching, Bartering and Leadership
- R: Stands for Reason. Affects Medicine, Reaping, and Expert Munitions
- D: Stands for Dexterity. Affects Echnanting, Advanced Combat, Basic Munitions, and Repairing.
In addition to these base stats, your Mages can also come with certain positive, neutral or negative perks that further affect their performance. There are quite a few of them in the game, such as Zealous, Intuitive, etc. Hover your mouse over the perks to see what they do.
Once your Mages reach a certain level of experience (earned through working on your Tower), you can promote them. This will let you upgrade their stats and make them stronger. Promoting your Mages will also increase your upkeep cost, so only promote them when you’re ready.
Excellent Room Varieties
What makes Artificer’s Tower great is the variety of rooms that you can build. Every single module is different and adds something extra to your overall colony. The Essential tab has four buildings you want to build as soon as you start.
You also want to build a Dining Hall and Barracks to keep your Wizards happy. Once you get a bit stronger, you’ll be able to build Defensive rooms and a Library to do research and upgrade your defensive abilities. The whole concept is pretty cool!
The Combat
Yep – there’s combat here too. As you grow and expand your colony, you’ll occasionally get attacked by Orcs and monsters. They’ll get inside your Tower and plunder your rooms. To fend them off, you need to build Defensive rooms such as Trap Rooms and Shield Rooms.
You also need to assign your Wizards to the Shield Room if you want them to fight off the enemy. After a successful defense, your Mages will convert the fallen enemies into Essence that you can use for crafting.
Multiple Difficulty Options
Don’t let the cute graphics in the game fool you, Artificer’s Tower is a pretty hardcore sim that pushes your resource management skills to the limits. But thankfully there are plenty of difficulty options here for you to fine tune the experience.
Apart from the tutorial, you get three difficulty modes to choose from when you start up a new game. Peaceful, Lively, and Survival.
There’s also a Custom difficulty option available that lets you adjust the different parameters to fully customize your experience.
Artificer’s Tower Review – 8/10
Artificer’s Tower won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but for fans of the genre, it’s a must-have. The resource management elements in the game are quite polished and well-designed. We’ve had a pretty fun time with it, and the cute cartoony graphics seem like the perfect fit for this game.
It’s a challenging game, sure, but the tutorial segment of the game does a good job of explaining how everything works. So, if you’re a fan of the genre, don’t hesitate to pick this one up when it hits the digital shelves on April 18th. Good luck!