Do not ever let somebody inform you Yahtzee is an harmless, informal recreation. Yahtzee is easy, sure—principally luck, with a touch of ability and math in the way you rating your rolls—however additionally it is brutal. Virtually each single time you play, this recreation forces you to inflict a grievous wound to your personal morale and ego. The chance that you will have to fill within the little field in your scoresheet to your “Yahtzee” roll with a zero is excessive. You maintain off so long as you’ll be able to, hoping to roll that uncommon five-of-a-kind to attain a powerful 50 factors, however as soon as you have used up your Likelihood and settled for a meager three-out-of-five sixes, it is time to face actuality.
You’ll not roll a Yahtzee. There is no such thing as a room left for hope. All that is left is ready for the top.
Anyway, that is what I used to be interested by when an undead snake began tearing by way of the village I might spent the final three hours constructing in Luckitown, a dice-based tower protection recreation that hit Steam final week. An incredible roll is exhilarating right here as it’s in Yahtzee: in a single memorable flip earlier within the recreation I rolled each useful resource I wanted to construct a robust fortress, which might each fireplace arrows and spit out well-armored knights. It was like rolling a full home in a single go. Yahtzee’s randomness will be merciless, however it can be exhilarating when it goes your means (or not less than as exhilarating as rolling just a few cube and doing primary math can get).
I might managed to defeat Luckitown’s first two bosses by making one of the best of the RNG, however the third one merely slithered over the defensive partitions I might meticulously constructed up in entrance of my arrow towers, bulldozing the squishy homes behind them. For each constructing it destroyed it spawned one other vertebra on its bony physique, which was frankly insulting. Luckitown did not pressure me to pencil in a zero, however I knew hope was useless simply the identical.
It damage, as a result of Luckitown is a very cute recreation. Like most video games by the Sokpop Collective, it is deliberately lo-fi, a easy idea spun out right into a $5 recreation that you’re going to most likely be happy with after just a few hours. The pitch right here grabbed me instantly: a tower protection recreation the place your cube rolls decide what you construct, forcing tough selections between banking cube for what you need to construct, or utilizing them instantly to plug a niche.
Clearly I’ve robust emotions about Yahtzee.
Luckitown begins you with a small cube pool with assets like lumber and stone that permits you to construct low-cost primary constructions. Homes “energy” farms and barracks and arrow towers. Farms and workshops and magic totems develop your cube pool and award you particular supplies to construct fancier stuff like cannons, trebuchets, and crypts, which flip the souls of your personal fallen troopers into magic missiles. There’s some typical however nonetheless satisfying tower protection technique to work with right here, like coping with each flying and skittering enemies and utilizing particular towers to entice or sluggish enemies as they march in direction of your fortress.
The graphics to your little cottages and tiny knights are cute and remind me of ’80s RPGs like Ultima, which is why I took it so onerous when that rattling snake got here in and trampled my entire village. I might additionally spent an unusually very long time dedicated to that construct: most tower protection video games I’ve performed are divided into missions, however Luckitown simply duties you with surviving the entire recreation in a single go, which is able to take 2-3 hours. Fail or end and it is again to the start.
I do not suppose the Sokpop Collective usually make sequels, however I hope Luckitown proves to be an exception. I feel Sokpop has an ideal idea right here that it might develop on with some shorter missions and maps that allow you to reap the benefits of the setting moderately than increasing throughout a giant open area. The 2D constructing grid might additionally use some refining: it may be onerous to inform how buildings align, which left me twiddling with my tower placement far too typically. However I am already interested by what I might do in another way subsequent time and plotting what towers I am going to use to kill that bone serpent—not less than, if the cube go my means.
