Epic Auto Towers

This is a game for players who enjoy the shop screen more than the fight that follows it, and a clean pass for anyone who saw the word Towers in the title and expected lanes, creeps and a defence grid. There is no tower defence here whatsoever. What you get instead is an autobattler with deckbuilder bones: a buy phase where you pick up units, stack upgrades and arrange a board, then a button press that hands the turn-based tactics over to the game while you sit back and watch it resolve. Aleksandr Golovkin has been building it alone since the November 2024 release, and it still wears the Early Access label, which matters for a couple of reasons I will come back to. The decision density is entirely front-loaded, and that is the design working as intended rather than a shortcut. Every run is a sequence of small economic questions. Do you spend now on a unit that wins you this round, or bank the currency to refresh the shop and fish for the piece that makes your combo actually scale? Do you commit to the synergy you have been dealt, or pivot while pivoting is still cheap? Because combat resolves itself, the game is really asking you to price out futures: what a board is worth three rounds from now against what it kills today. That is a genuinely good loop, and the feedback arrives fast enough that you learn the numbers by feel instead of by reading a wiki. Think of it as the shop phase of a big autochess title with the multiplayer stress, the ladder anxiety and the twenty-minute lobbies stripped out of it. Which brings me to the thing I want to defend, because it gets misread constantly. Strategy games with the word optimisation anywhere near them tend to frighten off newcomers who assume a second monitor of spreadsheets is required. Here it genuinely is not. Runs are short, the cost of failure is a few minutes rather than a ruined campaign, and the whole skill curve is repetition of one small decision type: what do I buy, and where does it go. If you have ever wanted to understand why autobattler players talk about economy and tempo but bounced off the competitive versions, this is about the friendliest classroom going. Full controller support (DualShock included) and Steam Cloud mean it survives being played from a sofa in ten-minute chunks, which is honestly the way it plays best. Now the honest part. Close to eight hundred Steam reviews sit around seven in ten positive, and the shape of that split tells you exactly what happens after week one. A puzzle box gets solved. Once you have found the two or three combo lines that reliably carry a run, the shop stops asking interesting questions and starts asking you to confirm a plan you already had before the first purchase. There is no multiplayer to keep a meta moving, no pool of human opponents inventing counters you did not anticipate, and no mod support to outsource variety to the community, which is precisely the lever a big grand-strategy release would pull at this point in its life. Solo development also means new content arrives at solo-development speed. For an Early Access product that is a fair trade, but judge it on what is in the build today rather than on what a roadmap might promise. So what you have is a sharp, focused, well-scoped little machine that does one thing properly and never pretends to be a hundred-hour obsession. Treat it like a crossword rather than a campaign. Keep it installed for the gaps between bigger games, play a run while something else patches, and it comfortably earns its slot on the drive. Go in expecting a genre-defining autobattler with bottomless replay depth and you will hit the wall inside a fortnight, then write one of those three-in-ten reviews yourself.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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