Lornsword Winter Chronicle is a MOBA-style strategy game by developer Tower Five. Units will auto-spawn from buildings and can be directed to either wait at their spawn area, immediately head for the enemy base, or head to the enemy base once a group of them has gathered.
That’s not to say that you can’t exercise direct control over your units. The game has a method for controlling your units that reminded me of how you control units in the Pikimin games. You can order up to 15 units to follow you; They will match your speed and go where you go. However, they will not attack anything while they are following you. You need to order them to stop following you in order for them to start attacking. When units aren’t following you or waiting around their spawn point, they will start heading for the enemy base (or, if they can’t do that for some reason, then they will just wander about). Personally, I found it more useful to just tell my units to head straight for the enemy base.
There are two resources you need to manage: gold and food. Gold is fairly self-explanatory, you need it to build buildings and upgrades. Food is actually a measure of how many buildings you can have at once. Every building has a food value, and if its cost exceeds the amount of food you have, the building can’t be placed. Strangely enough, spawning new units doesn’t cost anything.
The enemy is also able to freely spawn units, so simply taking resources from the enemy isn’t enough to stop them from sending waves of enemies at you. To stop the flow of enemies, you need to destroy the buildings that spawn them. I found this to be a rather interesting addition, as it meant that you could not win by waging a war of attrition.
Aside from guard towers and unit-spawning buildings, you can also build altars to summon elementals. These altars can’t be built normally, rather an existing empty altar has to be upgraded with gold to summon a specific elemental. While this means that altars don’t have a food cost, it also means that the number of altars your base starts with is the number of altars you get for the whole match. As opposed to building units normally, the elementals can be summoned around your commander, regardless of where he is on the map, making this ability very powerful. However, summoning takes a stamina cost, so you can’t just summon all of them at once (through upgrades, the most I could summon was two groups of elementals).
While the emphasis of the game is summoning and controlling units, that’s not to say that your commander is completely defenseless on his own. The commander comes with a basic attack that is able to take out most units one-on-one. However, this does not mean that it can be used to fight the enemy alone. While your commander is capable of performing his own attacks, it is clearly meant to support your units, not act in their place.
Lornsword Winter Chronicle also has a co-op mode, but I was unable to test this. Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game.
Check Out the Lornsword Winter Chronicle Steam Early Access Trailer:
Lornsword Winter Chronicle is available for PC via Steam Early Access.
I am a recent Computer Science/Game Development Programming Chapman University Graduate. I am a life long enthusiast of computer/video gaming and my favorite game genres are adventure, choice-driven stories, fighting, and racing. My favorite game/movie series include but aren't limited to 'Legend of Zelda'; 'Dragon Age'; 'Persona'; 'Sonic the Hedgehog'; 'Mario'; 'Metroid' ;'Megaman'; 'Naruto'; 'Batman'; 'Spiderman'; 'Star Wars'; and 'Star Trek.'
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