Castillon Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Play
A bite-sized medieval fantasy of build-by-day, defend-by-night that's part strategy, part Tower Defense, part city build
Castillon calls itself a short Strategy game where you build and defend a castle with magic. I'd call it a little bit of Tower Defense, a little bit city builder, a little bit strategy, and a little bit RTS, all in a medieval fantasy dress. I played for around two hours, cleared the first two levels, and got obliterated on the third.
Castillon delivers the base-defence RTS itch in a short-run format, without asking for an evening. The randomised upgrades change what you're doing run to run, the tower crystal stacking gets weird in a good way, and dropping a meteorite into a swarm never got old. Two hours in, two levels cleared, one wider map that beat me and made me want to try again. It's a Play, and I already know what I'm changing on my next run.
Pros
- Randomised upgrade cards force real strategy shifts run to run, especially once the town centre levels raise your choice count
- Tower crystal combos get properly creative once you can stack more than one per tower
- Casual RTS pacing that gives you enough time to build without asking for build orders
- Level three's spike was hard enough to leave me planning the next attempt before I closed the game
The Day Phase
You start with a town centre and a wizard you control directly. Your mount can be a horse, a flightless owl or a spider. During the day you ride around and gather resources by pressing space on rocks, trees or berry bushes. Or you build lumber mills, quarries and berry patches and let villagers do the collecting. Houses raise your population cap so you can staff more.
I tried one run leaning hard into economy. The first couple of nights were rough because my defences were thin, but the resources coming in later made the following waves much easier. You can also build barracks for soldiers, an archery range for archers, and a celestial statue that spawns an angel to hover over your base. You can go out to enemy camps during the day for chest rewards, which pulls you away from the safe economy loop for a payout.
The Night Phase
The enemy mix is varied. Fast runners ignore everything and beeline your town centre. Bats fly over walls you don't have yet. Generic mobs come in swarms. Ogres and catapults hit harder and are meant to grind you down.
You get spells for the wizard through upgrade picks. The mine spell drops and explodes three seconds later. Meteorite is the one I kept reaching for. It wipes huge waves of weak swarming enemies but does almost nothing to catapults or ogres, so you still need towers, troops and positioning for the heavy stuff. If the wizard dies you respawn at the town centre after eight seconds. I did more than one kamikaze run: ride in, drop the meteorite, get deleted, respawn.
You can also block yourself in. One night I had packed buildings so tight around the wizard that I couldn't move mid-fight. I ended up demolishing my own stuff to escape.
Towers, Upgrades and Green Gems
After every wave you get an upgrade choice at the town centre. At level one you get three cards to pick from, and the number of choices grows as you level it up. The cards are randomised. One wave you'll be offered walls, a marketplace and a healing shrine. The next wave you get nothing you actually want. You can always reroll if you can afford it, and that's what stops a bad draw from wrecking a run. Which upgrades keep appearing really does shape what strategy you can even try.
Green gems drop from enemies killed at night. They're the reroll currency for upgrade cards. If a building gets destroyed in a raid, you can reclaim the resources it cost to build, or spend green gems to rebuild it instantly. They're also what you feed into your towers.
Towers aren't just arrows on a wall. You slot magic crystals into them and the combinations get properly weird. One crystal does more damage and drops extra green gems per kill. Another swaps arrows for explosive barrels for AoE. There's an ice shot. Some crystals drop from enemies and some come from upgrade card picks, so what's on the board is again shaped by what the game randomly offers. As the town centre levels up you can stack more crystals per tower, so you end up with a turret firing explosive barrels that also drops green gems on kill. That's where I started having fun.
Maps and Overall Feel
Walls don't unlock straight away. Early defence is towers slowing enemies and troops taking hits. Once walls came in I was doing double and triple layers to give my towers time to work. Catapults outrange the turrets though, so they can sit outside your walls and chip through them.
Each level is a different map with around eleven waves. The pitch says about 45 minutes per level. I was closer to half an hour once I knew what I was doing. I failed level one a couple of times while learning, then cleared levels one and two. Level three, Templar's Rest, is a much wider map with more directions for enemies to spawn from. I was struggling to get defences and economy in line before waves hit from angles I wasn't ready for. I was close, so I'll be going back in after this review to try a different economy-defence split.
Days last somewhere between sixty and a hundred seconds. That's enough time to place buildings but not enough to bog you down in perfect optimisation, and there's a bit of a time crunch near the end of the day. It hits the RTS itch without asking you to memorise build orders. Calling it Tower Defense feels off. You use towers to defend, but the loop is more about running the wizard, drafting random upgrades and juggling economy than about lane routing.
Visually it's a soft painterly top-down. Terrain is chunky and stylised: rocky cliffs enclose your patch of village and little pointy pines dot everything around it. Buildings are cartoon low-poly with pitched red and orange rooftops. The palette swings warm amber during the day and cools to purple and dusk-blue at night, so you always know which half of the cycle you're in at a glance. Enemies read cleanly even when there's a lot on screen. The UI stays out of the way, with a gold-framed wave clock in the corner counting down to the next night. Art, sound and battle feedback all felt tight.
Developer: One Up Plus / 2 Left Thumbs
View on Steam
Tags: Strategy, Tower Defense, base builder, Indie
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