Bonsai Castles

I'll be the first review in English I guess. The game is what it looks like; you have to build a castle and defend it from waves of enemies. The progression is relatively simple; you have different tiers of buildings, walls, and turrets, and you must upgrade and plan your defenses. You get resources from defeating waves of enemies, which you can use to build more fortifications and research upgrades in between the increasingly harder waves of enemies. Most of the strategy in building seems to come from managing the sight lines of your turrets, as some walls will hinder or outright block your turrets line of sight. To get around this you can have your turrets shoot through holes in the walls, build your turrets inside towers that can shoot over the walls, or build your turrets inside some of the walls themselves. Overall the game is fairly simple, but it is still a good time, and it is definitely worth the 10$ price tag. I would definitely recommend.

Very fun tower defense game. After finishing the tutorial and one map at normal difficulty (at the time of writing), these are the two main things that I've noticed that set it apart from other TD games: 1. Opportunistic enemies. Just because you've created an intricate route to your castle's main gate, doesn't mean the enemies are actually going to attack there. If they think they have a better chance breaking right through a wall somewhere, they'll attempt to do that. Keep your entire castle fortified at all times! 2. Resource gathering. Enemies drop resources when defeated, but these are not automatically added to your inventory. Instead, after every enemy wave, workers emerge from your main building and walk out onto the battlefield to gather them. But because this gathering phase is time limited, you're presented with an interesting trade-off: if you've made it very difficult for the enemies to reach your keep, it will also become more difficult for your workers to navigate the terrain, and you'll starve yourself of the resources you need to build new things in the next round. But if you make it easy for your workers to move around, then your enemies will benefit as well. Pl…

Simple, cute but satisfying. It blends tower defense and city builder by alternating between defense and construction phases (with a gathering phase in-between). There's only three attack types, but the tech tree can unlock buildings that can house several "shooters" at once. These buildings can be used as parts in creating bigger and more complex Japanese-style castles, which can also be decorated with things like market stalls, statues, farms, cherry blossom trees, shrines. There's a lot of room for creativity in making one's ideal Japanese-style castle, and the simplified TD gameplay offers a pleasant background to half-focus on. Half-focus since there isn't really any challenge at medium difficulty. I haven't played on higher difficulties, but even if they're not challenging, almost any gameplay option can be tweaked when creating a new map to play on.

Super fun. This is a great little castle builder/tower defense game. It's still in early access, and it shows in some places, but it has a lot of potential. If you like building a machine and then watching it function then this game has a lot to offer. All-in-all, I'm really looking forward to how this game develops and would love to see an addition of traps and turret variety. Only minor issue is that the controls are a little clunky, and could be better streamlined for building efficiency.

Needs slightly better translations for english, but really good regardless.