NO ENTRY: OUR BURROW Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Play
Cute animals, rubber ducks, and a linking system that sets it apart from the tower defense crowd.
No Entry: Our Burrow is a Tower Defense Roguelike from a small Chinese team where cute animals defend their underground burrow from an alien invasion. Creatures sit in a placement grid at the burrow entrance while aliens approach from every direction. The linking mechanic, chaining creatures together for bigger combined specials, is what sets it apart from the genre. The link four upgrade is a nuclear egg. This reviewer never got to find out what it does.
NO ENTRY: OUR BURROW is a tower defense roguelike where cute animals defend an underground home from aliens. The linking system, where players chain creature specials together, adds meaningful depth beyond basic placement. The demo is worth playing, and an infinite mode gives extra mileage once the four main stages are cleared.
Pros
- Unique creature linking mechanic
- Charming visual style
- Infinite mode after main content
- Permanent progression across runs
Cons
- Bedroom UI buttons misaligned with graphics
The Core Hook
Link two creatures together when their energy bars fill and rubber ducks fly out and attack the aliens. Link three and a toxic egg drops across the map, poisoning everything it touches. The link four upgrade was listed in the shop the whole session. A nuclear egg. Running out of bottle caps before affording it meant spending the rest of the time wondering what it does.
That escalating absurdity is the whole appeal of No Entry: Our Burrow. The title is almost certainly a translation issue. By the time rubber ducks are chasing aliens around the map, it feels completely right.
Gameplay Systems
Creatures sit in a placement grid at the burrow entrance, surrounded by aliens coming from every direction. You place animals into it and they fire automatically. No individual movement once placed. Everything in the Roguelike loop comes from which creatures you pick, which upgrades you take between waves, and how you manage the linking.
Every creature builds an energy bar while it fights. Fill the bar and you have seven seconds to trigger its special attack. Let multiple bars fill at once and drag a line across them for a combined hit. Even before unlocking any special skills, linking does more damage the more creatures you chain. The rubber ducks from a link two and the toxic egg from a link three are skills you buy on top of that base mechanic, which makes saving up bottle caps for the right moment genuinely interesting.
The dual currency system gives the game its structure. Bottle caps fund in-run upgrades chosen from three random options each wave, with a reroll at cost. Gold earned across runs permanently upgrades creatures and base health. Upgrades are tied to specific creatures and do not transfer, so deciding where to invest the meta progression matters.
Three beds in the burrow hold your active team. The others wait on the floor. It is a small detail that makes roster management feel like it belongs to the world rather than a menu screen. The demo includes four stages, an arcade machine that unlocks after clearing them for infinite mode, and five creatures to unlock starting from three.
Issues to Note
Enemy targeting priority is the main mechanical issue. Some aliens stand at range and fire projectiles, but creatures always target the closest enemy first. That lets distant ones deal significant damage before anything addresses them.
The character selection bedroom screen had off-centre graphics and buttons throughout, though this did not appear anywhere else in the game. Both issues were reported to the developer and acknowledged.
Verdict
The Tower Defense genre has a lot of entries that feel similar to each other. The linking mechanic here does something genuinely different with the moment-to-moment decision-making. Four positive reviews are already up and all of them mention how cute it looks. They are not wrong, but the depth underneath the cuteness is the real reason to download it.
Go in curious about the nuclear egg. Report back if you find out what it does.
Developer: One Team
View on Steam
Watch the video review: YouTube
Tags: Tower Defense, Roguelike, Indie, Strategy
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