Imagine the French Revolution as fought by squirrels and you basically get the premise of High Tale Studios’ Acorn Assault: Rodent Revolution . The indie tower defense game released on Steam two months ago and while it, unfortunately, hasn’t built the level of community needed to make it a hit, the game holds a number of attractive elements to make it worth checking out.
Acorn Assault's game story is loosely based around the French Revolution – if it were fought by squirrels of course. In the game you assume the character of Charles DeMontequirrel, a revolutionary squirrel who’s had all he will take of King Louis the Umpteenth and his queen, Marie Antoinutte’s oppressive “nut tax.”
The object of the game is to defeat his royale nutiness by waging campaigns against the king’s loyal guard. The game features five campaigns with five battles in each.
The gameplay adopts the familiar turn-based strategy found in many tower defense games. Both players have a 6x5 grid field in front of a fort or building. At the beginning of your turn, you are given a certain amount of defensive and offensive objects (barrels and squirrels respectively) that increase by two after each turn.
An interesting twist to this game is a match-three element. Basically, when any three offensive or defensive objects are placed in adjoining spots on the grid, they combine into a more powerful unit capable of taking or dealing heavier damage. The match three element takes the strategy to a deeper level because you are constantly planning and scheming the best way to arrange your unit for maximum defense and offense.
The game includes three useful powerups players can access that increase either strength or defensive units, offensive units, or raise the health of the building you are defending. These powerups can be purchased at 200 acorns a pop. But acorns can be difficult to come by.
At the start of your turn, you will notice specific spots on your grid that have acorns on top of them. If you place a unit on top of these acorns, you collect the bonus, which you can use toward powerups. Your opponent can see them too and will likely use this information against you. The further you progress in the game, the more difficult it becomes to gather up enough acorns. Starting at level three of your first campaign, the king begins taking 100 of your stored acorns as a tax which he can use to beef up his defense, offense or health points. As you reach higher and higher levels, the acorn taxes increase as well, while your opponent may also gain other benefits like automatic defense strengthening with each turn.
Besides light and entertaining gameplay elements, the game also includes beautiful graphics (the squirrels couldn’t be more adorable in their French Revolution-themed clothing) and some fun and quirky humor found in the smack talk between the revolutionary squirrels and the king’s troops.
Acorn Assault: Rodent Revolution includes three different modes of play – campaign mode (single player mode against AI opponent) and online or local multiplayer modes. The really unfortunate thing about this game, however, is that it doesn’t have an active online community, which makes the online battle mode pretty much impossible to ever participate in. This game could have a lot of potential if the creators could do more to increase the online community. Playing Acorn Assault against a wide variety of online opponents with differing strategic thinking would make the game more engaging and extend the lifelong use of the game by players.
Acorn Assault is the second game High Tale Studios released since its inception in 2012, and has been an ongoing work in progress. While the English version of the game was initially released on Steam March 2, the developers are working to bring the game to a larger group of players, adapting it for release in other countries and languages as well as developing a port for Xbox One. Hopefully, the providing the game to a larger population of users will help build the online community. In addition, High Tale Studios' co-Founder, Derrick Canfield told iDigitalTimes the team is currently planning ways to increase online community involvement.
"This is something we really would like to improve since online multiplayer is one of the best features of the game," said Canfield. "We will be looking at events to drive more people to play like an event for playing against us online."
Still, even if the online mode never takes off, we think the game is well worth the time of anyone who enjoys turn-based strategy or the tower defense genre.
The game is on sale now for Mac and Windows computers at the Steam store for just $4.99. You can check it out or download it, here.
