Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Tomb of Tyrants

[quote name="Mischief Maker"]Wonderfully promising concept: A Dungeon Keeper/Puzzle Quest mix where you dig into the ground by clearing a match-4 puzzle and use the collected resources to build rooms behind you populated with traps and nasty monsters to fight off pesky heroes trying to chase down and slay your Tyrant. Unfortunately the final game is less than the sum of its parts. I always complain about unlock cancer, but this is the first game I played that is actually ruined by it. There's a branching tech tree in this game where building certain rooms cuts off other branches, but you need to jump through some fairly challenging hoops to not only unlock higher-tier rooms, but get info when building lower-tier rooms what avenues you're cutting off for yourself by building them. The result is sometimes you can have a game where you just run out of rooms to build because you've built yourself into an invisible corner and there's nothing to do but wait and die or manually restart. Even when you do unlock enough to have a decent early game, what you get isn't that great. Each room can hold up to three units in battle and extra heroes walk right past the fight to the subsequent room. The fights are designed to take a long time forcing you to build a larger and larger army, but the individual units also require a fair amount of micromanaging and with your attention divided between the puzzle board and your vertical dungeon too large to fit on the screen without scrolling, it's easy to get lost. The icons designed to help out with watching units are made of tiny amounts of pixels and baffling to try and understand, and the in-game manual doesn't provide much help in its tiny pixelated text. Even basic things like placing your units into parties is unnecessarily complicated. You can't just drag and drop, you need to manually pull an existing unit out of a space first. Just a frustrating mess. The game does have dynamic music that changes to match the theme of your chosen tech branch, but unfortunately all the music is ear-bleedingly awful chiptunes. And while some artists can do amazing things with pixel art, none of those people were working on this game. Kingdom: New Lands this ain't What a pity, I hope someone does a better job at this concept in the future.[/quote]