The Tower Defense gameplay loop lends itself well to the roguelite formula, and when done right, it can lead to addictive and satisfying games. The sense of slow and steady progression, overcoming ascending difficulty, and coming up with creative solutions in a simple environment are some of the best dopamine hits video games can deliver.
Hexguardian, developed by Split Second Games and published by Yogscast Games, is a roguelite tower defense in which you build towers and armies to defend against the unending hoards of enemies traveling through the modular hexagonal map placed by you. The formula might seem familiar to the fans of the Tower Defense genre, so does Hexguardian do it better?
I was a big fan of Tower Defense games back in the days of Warcraft III custom maps, but I fell out of the loop with the genre until recently when a friend suggested Isle of Arrows to me. I played that game for a couple of hours, but the minimalistic and monotone theme of the game, and the slow progression eventually wore me out. I felt like I was not making any progress, that there was only one viable build even though I had unlocked a lot of new techs, and the game atmosphere was honestly getting boring.
Hexguardian has a similar approach to gameplay, but it excels at every point that I felt Isle of Arrows came up short. Various colorful biomes and maps, a smart approach to the progression system, and a great variety of builds and strategies made me sink more than 20 hours into the game in just a handful of days.
The first thing that stood out to me in Hexguardian was the inclusion of army units. In addition to static towers, you could build army buildings that produced a handful of units to help you defend. This added limited mobility and flexibility to my game plans, and combining different units and abilities with the stationary towers led to some of my best runs in the game.
There are three main unit types in Hexguardian. Melee units can attack enemies on the road and force them to stop and engage in combat, ranged units can deal a lot of damage from a safe distance, and spell casters can deal various damage types and inflict status effects on the enemies. Each army building can send its troops to a certain radius, allowing you to defend from different paths and even change course during a level.
There are two path types that we have to defend in Hexguardian; Roads and rivers. Foot enemies usually come in larger numbers and stick together, making Area of Effect damage very powerful against them. Boats, on the other hand, are fewer, faster, and spread apart, making high single-target damage and slow effects the best way to deal with them.
When enemies die, they have a chance to drop stones, and stones give us new tiles to place on the map. The tiles can have roads, rivers, or both in various directions. If you plan from the start and get lucky, you can close the loop on some of the entry points and stop enemies from coming from those paths.
This adds a way for overcoming the most challenging part of Hexguardian, dealing with both soldier and boat-type enemies. It’s possible to close the loop on either the rivers or the roads, and only have to worry about one enemy type. This narrows the strategy and allows for better upgrades. You can also close the loop on every path and end the run to earn some bonus points.
After each run, you get points to spend and unlock new technology. There are a lot of different units, towers, economy buildings, spells, and passives to choose from, and it can get overwhelming to have all these options in the run. But a great addition to the talent tree is the ability to lock some of the unlocked talents to stop them from appearing in your game. You get more lock points as you unlock more talents, and can prepare for certain maps by locking talents that would not be useful in them.
The pace of progression, while slow, is very tangible and meaningful. In the beginning, I could unlock a new talent after each run, and once I unlocked about half of the talents, I needed a few quick runs or one good run in a high-difficulty setting to get enough points for my next talent.
The difficulty in Hexguardian is also a very customizable aspect of the game. There are different biomes with unique features and difficulty levels, and whenever I got frustrated from losing in harder challenges, I could go back and play an easier map in which I could go long, experiment with new builds, and still earn enough points to progress in the talent tree.
The gameplay of Hexguardian makes it a game that I likely will never uninstall from my system, coming back to it occasionally when I want a casual and fun gaming session. But to top it all off, Hexguardian looks and sounds beautiful. The colorful and varied art style in each biome, bold visual effects, and adorable character designs create a lovely visual experience. With a chill soundtrack, accurate sound effects, and satisfying auditory feedback, the game’s sound design enhances the experience without being distracting.
Hexguardian is a game that in my opinion, surpasses other recent titles in the genre. It captures the satisfying core gameplay of Tower Defense with clever additions to its strategies and progression system while providing a beautiful environment for the players to be immersed in.
Nima played Hexguardian on PC with a review code.
