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Ark of Charon is a city builder mixed with some tower defence developed by Angoo Inc. and SUNSOFT. The game is available for £17.99 on Steam and whilst it is in early access, its version 1.0 is coming soon. Now, join me as I ride on the back of a piece of The Great World Tree, as it makes its way to its new home!
We have a long journey ahead.
We get a rather short story explaining that the World Tree gave life to the world. But one tragic day, it began to wither. This lead to life dying and darkness creeping in. Now a sapling emerges, shining hope for a new generation and it’s down to you to help it. Well, it’s more guard it than doing any growing in Ark of Charon.
Gameplay
Ark of Charon has two game modes as of the time of writing, one is the bog standard and the other a more rogue-like approach. I played the normal story and with that you can decide between having enemies like normal or easy mode where you won’t have to deal with them. There is a third option, but it’s safe to assume that is the game’s hard mode.
The in-game tutorial is quite informative. However, I’d prefer that the game walked you through the mechanics step by step. Instead, you’ll get an icon on the right side of the screen, you can click to explain how things work. I would suggest playing on easy to learn the fundamentals, that way you don’t get attacked and have to worry about defence.
Golems
The Golems in the game serve as your workers. They will mine, farm, and build atop of the creature. You can prioritise specific tasks for them, some of them perform better at certain task. They will need food to function and this is one of the key resources the player needs to help the colony thrive.
The core in the centre is what you must defend, but it also allows you to create new Golems. To spawn one, you must first collect souls from defeating the fly monsters that attack during a Darkness Storm. Once you have gathered three, you can then summon a new Golem. Souls can have unique aspects depending on which way you summon them. However, I couldn’t really figure this out. When I had six souls, I couldn’t select which trait I wanted to use. I simply had to choose the one already highlighted.
Buildings & Darkness Storms
When building structures, you can dedicate certain areas for storage. Buildings start off as wood, but you can upgrade them to stone and onwards through the technology trees. Buildings have Bearing Strength, which is shown through colours (green for safe, yellow for caution, and red for danger) in the filter of the same name. Periodically, the sky turns red, and the Darkness comes to attack the core of your tree. This combat against the Darkness plays out as you typically find in tower defence games.
Waves of enemies attack, which get stronger over time. To protect your core, you’ll need to build defences. While you don’t have to control the defences and neither do your golems, it is your job to keep ammunition stocked up. You can manually fire weapons if you wish.
Graphics & Audio
Charming, vibrant and idyllic are three words that come to mind while taking in the visuals of Ark Of Charon. The colours, while vibrant, are soft enough to set a peaceful tone in the lush, grassy environments. The music is calm yet playful and plucky, though the combat music sounds similar to some found in Kingdom Hearts. I also love the design of the tree, the tree’s core and the cute little golems. My only gripe visually is the UI. It feels very cluttered, and it feels difficult sometimes to distinct where everything is.
Longevity
With the rogue-like game mode, I assume you can have countless hours of fun with Ark of Charon. I know I spent a good few trying to learn the game and still haven’t finished the game. As for replayability, I’ll let you know when I’ve finished it!
Final Thoughts
Overall Ark Of Charon is a slightly challenging but enjoyable experience. It’s a bit of a learning curve to start, which makes me grateful for the Idyllic mode on the main menu I mentioned earlier. This mode greatly helped me to get my bearings with the actual gameplay. I also appreciated being able to return to previous areas on the map. Since the new area has more foes and higher difficulty, it felt good to return to an easier previous level to gather more materials at your own pace. However, I wish a job system would replace the Golems’ priority system.
Though it’s nothing new, I feel it would be more efficient and simpler to have Golems specialised in set roles, such as farmer or builder, instead of toggling their priorities.
I award Ark of Charon the Thumb Culture Gold Award.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
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