Ratropolis

Ratropolis is the first game from Cassel Games, an independent studio founded by students of the "Sogang" school in South Korea. It is their very first game, and it has the merit to offer a mix of new genres: rogue-lite, tower defense, deck building, and city construction/management. In addition to that, Ratropolis presents a new and, in our opinion, a daring mix of genres. The primary genre is tower defense: you must protect the town hall (the heart of your city) from invaders at all costs, or you will be defeated. The slightest hit on this precious building and the game ends instantly.

To do this, you have a deck of cards at your disposal, each costing a certain amount of gold. These cards allow you to both build buildings (single-use cards) and convert your fellow rats into loyal soldiers (multi-use cards). You'll need to build walls on either side of your city, which extends horizontally, with the game offering a side-scrolling view (like 2D platform games). Also, each game is different, which allows the game to get the rogue-lite label (which has been very fashionable for about a year now).

The game proposes to choose a leader; this one has a passive and active skill with a relatively long cooldown (cooldown time). Each leader is unique and completely changes the way of playing.

For example, the General leader allows you to passively obtain rations for each military card you have in your deck, which avoids focusing on building houses, which is usually the perfect way to achieve them. Besides, its active skill allows you to temporarily upgrade the military cards in hand, which is very useful for deploying boosted units at the wall level.

On the other hand, the Builder Leader has the passive ability to upgrade any building or wall by reusing an identical map on it, which saves space in the city and provides robust defenses. His active skill discards X cards from his hand and allows him to obtain X building cards in exchange temporarily, an excellent synergy with the passive one.

All in all, the artistic direction is friendly, the drawings (especially the cards) are of excellent quality, and the mechanics of the game perfectly oiled. A game that deserves to be more known and is worthy of your time!