Diablo-like or Tower Defense?

Recently, a player from the community asked a great question after watching our gameplay video:

“Can't tell if this is a Diablo-like or a Tower Defense? The character looks like they're not attacking and just waiting for the pulsing tower to kill everything.”

That is excatly the point, as it is a little bit of both.

Steam post image Screenshot from the gameplay with the Lesser Demon.

Let us explain what we are doing differently, how we combine those two genre, and above all, what we are not doing:

An Action-RPG without active skills: The Tower Defense Aspect

In traditional Action-RPGs, you manage character stats and mana bars, use healing potions and actively trigger skills. We stripped all of that away. You exclusively control the movement of your character (the Husk). The attacks are executed completely automatically by your floating blades. With your arsenal of 666 weapons, you essentially build your own mobile Tower Defense hub.

Steam post image Gameplay shown in slow motion.

The player from the community was right: It is a Tower Defense game, but the "tower" is you.

Difficulty through Mass instead of Math

Since you, the player, act as a mobile tower, we have to challenge you differently. In many Action-RPGs, difficulty is increased by mathematically scaling up enemies later in the game, simply giving them more health points. We take a different approach. In our game, difficulty comes from gigantic enemy swarms (the Vagabonds) and the composition of the waves. To bridge the gap between the massive hordes and the final boss, we have now introduced a new enemy class: the Lesser Demon. It brings specific new behavioral patterns into the swarm that your autonomous weapons must react to.

Steam post image The Lesser Demon with the Vagabonds. Character moving and swords attacking.

We do not scale difficulty through pure math, but also through mass and enemy composition.

These are two of the six genres we are combining. We'll show and explain the others soon, too.