Highlights
- Set for release on April 18, 2024, Artificer's Tower is a magical mix of tower defense, base-building, and life-simulation gameplay.
- Players manage a mage school like Hogwarts in Artificer's Tower, recruiting students, assigning tasks, and battling enemies for a unique experience.
While The Sims is one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world, and Hogwarts Legacy somehow managed to beat out the likes of Star Wars, Zelda, and Call of Duty to become the best-selling game of 2023, both series probably won't receive another entry for quite some time. The Sims' Project Rene is still probably a few years off, and a Hogwarts Legacy sequel hasn't even been announced yet. In the meantime, Artificer's Tower is offering a unique blend of both.
Equal parts tower defense, base-builder, and life-simulation game, Artificer's Tower is juggling a hell of a lot, but its ambition has already done a great job of setting it apart from the rest of Steam's upcoming roster. Set to release on April 18, Artificer's Tower is the debut title from new indie studio RodentGames, which currently consists of just one Vancouver-based developer. While its gameplay doesn't imitate Hogwarts Legacy or The Sims exactly, Artificer's Tower should still offer a magical experience that'll keep fans busy until those franchises receive another entry.
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Artificer's Tower Is Equal Parts Sims and Harry Potter
Artificer's Tower Revolves Around a Magic School
The general premise of Artificer's Tower sees players build and manage their very own school for mages, not unlike Hogwarts as a wizarding school. When starting up Artificer's Tower for the first time, players will choose from a small selection of rooms that are used as the base of their ever-growing tower. Each room has a specific purpose, such as allowing for additional mages to be recruited, providing the students with food to eat, and researching more advanced spells.
While the player will start with a handful of young students, they'll continue to recruit more throughout the game, expanding their roster of students alongside expanding their tower. This is where Artificer's Tower's Sims-like gameplay comes in.
Each student has their own set of needs, including a hunger bar, sleep meter, and meters based on the tower's amenities, such as an entertainment and dining meter. Each student can also be given specific tasks to do around the tower, such as sweeping or scrying, with more options becoming available when more rooms are added to the tower. Players will need to carefully manage each student's needs to ensure that they're performing their tasks as efficiently as possible.
Artificer's Tower Can Get a Little Intense
But Artificer's Tower isn't all base-building and sim-management. Occasionally, the player's tower will be attacked by a gang of orcs, bandits, or other common fantasy foes. In combat, Artificer's Tower turns into an intense tower defense game, where players need to place their mages carefully to ensure that the enemies are defeated before they can ransack too much of the tower's resources.
But the task of defending the tower doesn't fall solely on the player's mages. On top of libraries, dorm rooms, dining halls, workshops, and barracks, Artificer's Tower gives players a range of defensive rooms. These rooms can be placed throughout the tower and are designed to slow enemy forces down as much as possible. This adds a nice layer of strategy to Artificer's Tower's base-building, as players are repeatedly forced to make tough decisions on whether their budget goes primarily on defense or knowledge.
Defeating enemies in battle and using resources in workshops can also give players new items that their mages can equip, granting special bonuses to certain tasks.
Artificer's Tower is set to release on April 18, 2024, for PC.
