Age of Enchantment is a new tower defense title that mixes deckbuilding and roguelike elements from developer Psychic Monkey Studio. It’s out now on Steam, priced at $10 with a 20% discount running as we went to press. In each run, players aim to take down 25 waves of enemies that get progressively stronger. To counter the enemy’s ever-growing strength, players need to build more towers, upgrade existing ones, and add buffs, called enchants, to give extra abilities.
The start of Age of Enchanment is all about grinding a few levels to give you permanent upgrades to your attack, speed, and overall health. Not all runs will be successful, and many will fail as your health depletes from enemies breaking through your lines. As with many tower defense titles, you start with a certain number of hit points, with lower enemies only depleting it by one or two points and larger ones taking off much more.
We lost quite a few rounds at first, but all runs give you experience points that will eventually lead to increasing your base stats and opening up new tower types to create a more rounded arsenal to use. It took us about three hours of play to unlock all the tower types, and then it was just a case of grinding away to increase the base stats. Another major aspect of Age of Enchantment is managing your card deck with each new level up, adding more powerful cards to be used in the next run. After a few level-ups, you’ll be equipped with enough power to hopefully win a run and destroy all 25 waves.
Each time you successfully defeat a wave, a new hand of cards will be dealt. There are two main card types, towers and abilities. The tower cards allow you to place a new tower or upgrade an existing one, depending on your current setup, while the ability cards increase stats such as speed or attack. What makes Age of Enchantment interesting is that you can only play a certain number of cards each wave. This is controlled by the mana pool, which works similarly to Magic: The Gathering, where once the mana is used, no more cards can be played.
During each run in Age of Enchantment, you combine unused cards to create a more powerful card, and this becomes more important the more each run progresses. Failure to upgrade enough of your deck will mean your towers aren’t powerful enough. On the flipside, if you constantly keep upgrading your cards, you won’t place enough towers or make them powerful enough, so there is a great balance between using cards and upgrading them that needs to be managed through each run.
Age of Enchantment is an excellent example of a tower defense title that adds lots of depth with the card management and level-up systems. Our only gripe was that the wizard towers seemed to be much more powerful than the other tower types, and we found ourselves constantly trying to get as many of those towers on the battlefield as possible. This isn’t a major problem, and it may be that some fine-tuning and balancing occur with any future updates. Overall, Age of Enchantment will appeal to tower defense fans as well as those that enjoy a game requiring lots of grinding and leveling up.
