Tomb of Tyrants (PC) review "A genre-mixing sucess"

Tomb of Tyrants is a fantastic game, which looks deceptively simple at first, but hides an incredible amount of strategy and depth. It’s a combination of match-4 and tower defense, with RPG rogue-like elements (unlocks and progressive upgrades of items and levels) and quite a bit of strategy involved. The learning curve can feel a little steep on first approach, but once you understand what you are doing you will find yourself playing this game again and again, and enjoying the hell out of it.

Your main goal is to defend your Tyrant, who dwells in the bottom floor of your dungeon. You do so by building floors, which are populated by different creatures that will fight off the heroes trying to reach and kill your Tyrant.

To build the floors you need resources, which you gather by matching tiles (4 or more). If you create a match in one of the special shapes listed around the tile pool (rituals), your capacity for that specific resource will increase. The last update has added some special tiles (dirt and wildcards) which require special conditions to be eliminated, increasing the challenge. To be able to build the floors you also need a number of empty rows in your resource pool. You can queue floors to be built as soon as you have enough resources and space.

Occasionally, special items will appear in the resource pool. When you match them, they will transfer to your item pool. Some of these items provide passive bonuses, some others can be activated to various effects (e.g. healing your minions, or gathering a particular resource). If the item is already in your pool, it will level up.

Special tasks can be fulfilled to unlock new items, minions and floors (prophecies) or to upgrade existing floors (plots). These appear at the top of the screen, and can take many forms: from doing a certain number of matches, to not spending a particular resource for a set period of time, to killing a number of heroes, levelling up some of your minions...
Plots generally have a time limit, and are easier to fulfil than prophecies.

Floors are progressively unlocked. There is a first set of paired, mutually exclusive floors (building one prevents you from building the other), which adds great replayability value (you can play with different combinations in subsequent playthroughs), but the higher level floors are unlocked independently, through prophecies.

Special minions can be dropped at any dungeon floor (e.g. to protect your Tyrant), and after they reach a certain level they are also carried over to subsequent playthroughs. At any point, you can right click on things to bring up the codex, which explains in detail what that floor/item/minion does (this is something I strongly encourage you to do!). There is also a brief tutorial, that explains action on the fly the first time you carry them out.

This is a veritable gem of a game, especially for the price. I am very surprised that it is not a best-seller. If you like any of the genres it covers, you should definitely give it a try!


Pros

Red alert - when the heroes reach the levels above your Tyrant, an alarm starts playing (you can turn it off completely, but I don't recommend it) so you can take actions to help the Tyrant survive the assault. In the late game, when the Tyrant is constantly under threat, I find the constant blaring a little annoying. This is personal preference, though.

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Community review by OgNimaeb (June 12, 2016) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.