Defend the Rook review

By Rogue or Rook, clear out waves of spawning enemies with your adventuring party in this intermittently clever departure from more turn-based tactical titles.

Occasionally, the language that developers use to describe their game isn’t always accurate. That’s the case with Sydney-based One Up Plus’ Defend the Rook. While the husband-and-wife development team toss around labels like roguelike and tower defense, both categorizations play a remarkably muted role in the game. But that said, Defend the Rook offers accessible strategy that moves at a quick pace. It’s probably worth a look if you like turn-based battles and you can get past a few irritating issues.

After downloading the 1.2 GB title, you’re encouraged to play through the game’s tutorial. It’s definitely recommended spending the next 45 minutes or so absorbing the game’s nuances. Rook makes some inventive digressions from most grid-based, tactics titles.

If you appreciate strategy games for their sweeping storylines, know that Rook’s narrative is rather skeletal. Conversations between a magister and a succession of opponents bookending each five-stage battle. This isn’t a bad thing, as the quality of the banter doesn’t quite measure up to the battling.

A Team of Familiar Friendlies

Beyond the eponymous piece that you obviously need to protect, you’ll control a trio of other archetypical characters. There’s the Warrior, with a limited movement range but possessing hard-hitting melee strikes. There’s also the Sorceress, who hits with a ranged attack and well as a nimble Rogue who can cross significant distances. Play permits each unit to move and attack, but if strike first, you surrender an ability to reposition your ally. What’s especially interesting is that your Rook has a moderately robust defense and even a mild defense ability. If the rest of your team is wiped, there’s the occasional feeling that you just might make it out alive.

Beyond their class-specific starting stats, you’re able to frequently upgrade your adventurers. At the conclusion of each stage, you can choose one of three upgrades for your characters. These extend stat buffs, temporary abilities, and bonuses based on things like unit positioning. Additionally, you might be offered the opportunity to heal a character, or even resurrect a fallen ally. After the end of five stages, you can use two different types of resources to upgrade your units or even your towers.

Tower Offensive is More Like It

Yes, Defend the Rook does have towers, but don’t expect the kind of labyrinthine levels of most tower defense titles. Instead, you’re given a constrained number of traps and turrets. These habitually activate when adversaries step on them or approach a tower, providing assists like stuns or even attacks. Given that the game tends to toss large enemy counts at players, having a fixed unit zap or fry weaker foes feels rewarding. The downsides are that these turrets are destructible and foes tend to target them. As such, you’ll have to ensure you have enough ambushes hoarded away for the final stages. I do wish they played a slightly more decisive role in battle. As it stands, much of Rook is easy enough on the default setting that tower deployment isn’t necessary.

While roguelike qualities show up in the random ally upgrades, don’t expect requisites like permadeath or intricate, procedurally-generated environments. When one of your three main characters die, they eventually be brought back. And while there’s a tiny bit of randomization when it comes to the distribution of tower foundations, there’s no exploration here. All of Defend the Rook is set on a 9×9, chess-like board.

Text Can Be Hard to Read in Handheld Mode

Unfortunately, there’s no zooming in on the battlefield. While the game will sporadically make selected units transparent, without the ability to rotate the board, it can be easy to overlook an enemy. Given the amount of on-screen space the battleground takes up, there’s little rooms for displaying stats. Sure, you can see basic information such as health, offensive power, armor. But there is often no visual remainder of the more exotic perks for each unit. If you’re used to that kind of data being shown in TCGs, the absence here can be troubling.

But let’s get to the real reason I nearly gave up on Defend the Rook– controller responsiveness is awful. Since the board in presented in an angled perspective, you need to hit diagonals on the Joy-Con to move the cursor around the battlefield. But if you don’t push in a precise direction, Defend the Rook effectively ignores your input. Holding a direction on the analog stick to slide the pointer around is just as problematic as well. Thankfully, there’s touchscreen support for handheld play, but if you are playing the game docked, prepare for infuriation.

Conclusion

If you can get past that hindrance, then Defend the Rook can offer enjoyment. Unlike most turn-based, gridded battlers, it runs at a quick pace. From supplemental damage dished out by towers to a restrained number of adventurers to manage, Rook keeps things moving at a rollicking rate. While the fight waves of foes can get repetitive even with the random perks, there are a few unlockable characters and modifiers that attempt to maintain interest. Yet, if any of this interests you, I’d have to recommended the mouse-based control scheme and larger screen of the Steam version over the Switch version.