Ash Warden popped onto my radar with its dark, gothic pixel art and its interesting take on tower defence games. Instead of placing towers down, in Ash Warden the towers are simply places to stand on, and you’ll need to swap your character between them to juggle defensive tactics. Crucially, Ash Warden is also an incremental game with a skill tree that forces you to make big decisions that lock you out of large portions of the abilities available. I’ve been vocal about incremental tower defence games feeling artificially slow before, but Ash Warden does this better than most. If anything, this game has the opposite problem…
The player is given a choice from the outset: become an archer or a swordsman. Each has a separate skill tree and different abilities to start with, yet I found the more I played, the more those traits converged. The archer gives faster single attacks, whilst the swordsman has slower sweeps that impact multiple enemies. These attacks are on autopilot, but your mouse cursor needs to collect the currency dropped by dead enemies. Each single-screen map has three or four towers on it, and you’ll use the number keys or mouse clicks to charge between the towers to defend them. Enemies you smash on the way are also damaged, opening up a new skill, whilst towers themselves can unlock a pulsing attack. The goal is to survive eight days of attacks, each with ten waves of enemies that conclude with a boss that always slows your attacks down. You will die a lot.
Any currency won can be taken to the skill tree to upgrade nodes, and any bosses slain unlock an upgrade currency used for choosing new abilities only. That might be multi-arrow shots or triggering explosive attacks. Maybe you fancy some thunder. There are eight abilities to consider, and then you can choose to beef up those abilities again with six extra triggers. You can add more lightning, fire damage, or explosions for range. You can also hunker down on heavy reductions on cooldowns and charges. These can fly under the radar at first, but they are useful to consider because any additional ability you gain needs charging by holding down a specific button and charging the ability up to 5 times its range to set it off. That takes time you may not have when a horde is smashing up a tower, and if one tower falls, it’s game over and back to the upgrade tree.
Ash Warden’s skill tree is decisive and meaningful. Each chonky upgrade is a choice that locks out something else, especially when you select the variant of an ability. You also earn XP and that unlocks a third currency type, often used to level up each node up to five times. I didn’t feel like I was grinding too heavily because each day brought a step up in challenge that I’d work towards beating. My main gripe is that the enemies themselves are incredibly basic and fall into two camps. The first are just cannon fodder, and they’ll move towards a tower to cause annoyance. The second camp contains red rings around them, and if you move your mouse cursor inside their influence, you’ll be stunned and unable to trigger a charged ability. I liked this idea, but it is easily dealt with by the sheer force of your main ability.
I also found Ash Warden rarely forces true prioritisation. Enemies spawn and head towards one tower at a time, and only on a few occasions late in the game do you have to consider which tower to protect first. It felt like a missed opportunity, given the main gimmick is to tower hop. It made Ash Warden far simpler than I expected, and much more like I was waiting to overpower the game. Thankfully, a full run of each character takes about 2.5 hours. There is replayability to try out different attack variants, but no endless or challenge modes to extend the main game beyond that. In some ways, I’m glad its short. In others, I wanted a more punishing tower-juggle mode that forces difficult decisions.
I enjoyed Ash Warden for what it is. Simple, quite polished and stylised, casual defence game. Don’t expect to be tested with skill or decision-making. Instead, enjoy the pixel art and noodling the game provides, and you’ll have a few hours of relatively fun tower hopping.
A review code was provided by the developer. Ash Warden is out on PC.
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