A satisfying PvP tower defense and hero fusing game | Full Review - Guardian Chronicle R

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Guardian Chronicle R is a tower defense hero collecting game featuring puzzle elements and PvP / coop action.

🟩Pros

+Satisfying puzzle and tower defense gameplay

+Intuitive and easy to pick up game mechanics

+Competitive PvP gameplay

+Challenging singleplayer / coop action

🟥Cons

-UI needs a little quality-of-life work

Guardian Chronicle R is the revamped version of the original Guardian Chronicle game from two years ago and features a similar gameplay style with some major improvements across the board and additional content.

It offers vibrant graphics, a mix of cell-shaded and anime art style, and lighthearted triumphant soundtrack to go along with it. The character and unit designs are visually appealing and familiar looking, leveraging the usual fantasy tropes that we have have with the archers, mages, warriors, with each hero having their own distinctive style and abilities. The animations are smooth and fluid, making sure the tower defense action is as satisfying as it can be.

The game offers a wide variety of units and heroes with unique abilities and attacks that players can deploy on the battlefield. Each unit and hero has different strengths and weaknesses, allowing for strategic gameplay and team composition. Players can grind and use some gacha luck to collect and upgrade units and heroes to improve their effectiveness in battle.

In Guardian Chronicle R, players take on the role of a commander and must defend their base from waves of enemies by placing hero units across the map. The game combines tower defense, real-time strategy, and puzzle elements, allowing players to strategically place and combine defensive heroes to fend off the incoming waves. Placing heroes will consume resources, which is in turn acquired by fending off units during the session.

The main highlight of Guardian Chronicle R is the puzzle-like element to it with the ability to fuse duplicate units together in the battlefield, upgrading them to the higher tiered level combining them into one unit. But there’s a catch, placing units, as well as upgrading them are all randomized from your deck of five, so there is a Tetris feel to it when it comes to the anticipation of the heroes that will be initially deployed or spawned as a result of a fuse. It’s all a satisfying balancing act of having to find the perfect balance between quality of quantity, with regards to resource consumption and fusing of heroes.

Aside from that, the positioning of the units will also come into play. Enemies will have a predetermined path from their spawn to your base, going around a “track”, so you will need to tactically place your units in a way that they must be defeated before they reach your base. Lastly, there are some synergy bonuses as well called Evolution, that unlocks an upgrade to heroes for that specific session, if the player is able to simultaneously deploy three different tiers of the same unit.

The whole system is pretty intuitive, you can drag duplicate units into each other to fuse them, or double tap a specific unit to auto-combine it with another close by if applicable. The latter is faster, but a riskier maneuver as there is no control on what hero unit will be consumed. And finally, the most clear cut improvement from the original Guardian Chronicle game is the hero tiers now have clear numbers and colors displayed below the units, making it visually easy to identify hero types and tiers.

I must admit, it’s frantic action at first, just me tapping randomly in the hopes of landing a fuse for the characters and exhausting my resources as soon as I get them, but once I got the hang of it, the strategic aspect is really deep and the action is a more relaxed one, it's like playing a tower defense game and a puzzle game like 2048, 2Fuse, or Tetris Battle at the same time.

Guardian Chronicle R features both single-player and multiplayer modes. In single-player mode, players can progress through a campaign, facing increasingly challenging levels and bosses. Multiplayer mode allows players to team up with others in cooperative battles or compete against them in PvP matches with a ranking system.

While the single-player and co-op mode is all about surviving the waves on your own or with a friend, the PvP is a whole other fun that is played in real-time. You are put side by side with an opposing player to defend your bases simultaneously, and the first one to fail, loses. PvP is probably the best mode out of the game, because it’s so much fun having to strategize defending your base with the goal of outperforming the opponent.

As part of being a live-service free-to-play game, it has all the hallmarks of being one. Login bonuses, gachas, premium currency, but fortunately there is no energy system in place to limit play. As a free-to-play experience, the game is perfectly enjoyable, especially if your focus is on the PvP element. My minor gripes with the game, it lacks get all or claim all buttons for many of the rewards and bonus pages, requiring you to click on each of them. As well as the lack of the players for other game modes when matchmaking.

Conclusion:

Guardian Chronicle R is an addictive tower defense game that combines elements of hero collecting, puzzle solving, and real time strategy PvP to provide an engaging gameplay experience to players, both competitively and casually.