By taking the classic castle defense/base building setup and making it mobile, I feel Charon’s Ark introduces some new twists to an old formula. But while it certainly looks promising, it’s also clear that this Early Access title has some issues that Angoo and Sunsoft will have to address if they want it to grow as big and strong as the plant creatures in it.
The game itself is more of a colonial simulation than a city builder. Nomadic villageand finds you caring for a four-legged tree creature, the only child of the life-sustaining world tree. As you travel across the kingdom, you’ll need to defend it from the creatures’ attacks, which you do by building a massive, bloody fortress on the poor creature’s back.
The building system looks simple, thanks to the side view, but each block you place has a weight and strength characteristic, preventing you from building a giant wooden tower or building too far without support. As you progress through the technology screens, you’ll unlock new materials to build with, with stronger materials allowing you to build taller structures as well as better withstand attacks. You’ll also get new crafting stations and defenses as you’d expect, although there are a few issues that can make progression unsatisfying or even boring at times.
First of all, the tech tree is laid out pretty flat, so you have basic techs like cooking and mining next to mortar and laser positions without any prerequisites. Each tech costs the same, so if you’re not careful, you can accidentally spend all your precious tech points on something you won’t have the means to build for quite some time. It also just lacks the general flow of tech trees that are usually there, subtly telling you what kind of things you should start with before building more complex techs.
The second problem is more difficult, and has to do with those structural upgrades. Say you’ve just unlocked stone or steel buildings, you might want to start using blueprints right away. Except before you can actually expand your base with them, you’ll first need to go back and replace all your old wooden structures so they don’t collapse under the weight of the new ones. Pillars and bricks are easy enough to upgrade by just building new ones on top of them, but buildings can only be upgraded this way if the new blueprint matches the old one perfectly, which they rarely do. So you end up having to dismantle and fiddle with your layout every time you unlock new building parts, which completely buries the joy of getting new stuff under a pile of busywork. It’s a good idea, it’s just mechanically unstable and it only gets worse the more you have to replace.
Combat is a simple case of placing turrets in good firing positions, with damage bonuses based on how high you can reach. You also have to manage your ammunition supply, but you can also manually control one of your positions to fire on its own. It’s pretty basic right now, but with a few more enemy types and weapons, I could see this really influencing how you design your castle layout.
Then there is Charon’s ArkThe loot and traversal mechanics are interesting not only because you’re no longer limited to the map you start with, but also because different areas contain different resources. You might decide you need to stock up on rocks and head straight to a rock-rich area with multiple mines. Even the enemies you face can change, which is important because collecting the souls of fallen enemies is how you spawn more golems, with different types of souls speeding up certain actions.
The downside is thematic rather than mechanical, as I can’t help but feel like a swarm of greedy locusts stripping an area of its natural resources before moving on. It’s just a bit of a contrast to Charon’s Arkthe whole “save the big tree to revive life” setup isn’t helped by how little the sapling creature actually does to anything. Some rewards for building a relationship with the creature would be nice, especially after letting you name it. Mine is called “Shrubby”.
So there are a few flaws in the foundation and a few areas that need a little more meat, but other than that Charon’s Ark There’s a lot of room for growth. If the devs can figure out how to address those issues, I’ll be looking forward to seeing how it develops after some Early Access time.
Charon’s Ark Available instantly for PC via Steam Early Access.
