Raw Fury 10th Anniversary Preview: Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road

My first dip into the tower defence genre was a weird element-themed custom map in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, which started a fascination with the process of towers, their placement and upgrading, and fighting the never-ending tide of incoming foes. I actually played so many TDs in my youth that I had thought myself completely burned out on the concept as a whole… until our latest trip to Raw Fury’s offices in Stockholm, Sweden, where I was given the chance to test out the upcoming title, Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road.

The game looks like a very standard example of the genre at the start: you play as a small peon running around a castle, trying to gather resources to build various towers to keep your walled-off home safe from an oncoming tide of enemies. This concept is, however, flipped on its head when your kingdom decides enough is enough, sprouts legs, and starts meandering toward the bottom of the screen.

In a mix of tower defence, roguelite, and bullet heaven, Monsters are Coming has you spinning quite a few plates at once, requiring you to keep an eye on your own health, the state of your walking bastion, and any interesting resources or extreme dangers around. While the now-bipedal castle can indeed strut away from the various monsters, it is still somewhat slow and requires protection. Armed with a sword and other weapons found during a run, you can indeed keep foes at bay, but it is definitely a losing battle.

Your best bet to keep this bundle of meandering masonry whole is to build, maintain, and upgrade towers and other support buildings around your main keep. These structures are often gained at certain checkpoints during a run, but they can also be purchased from shops and found in the wild. Once found or bought, you are free to place the building near your central base. I really liked how a bridge would appear connecting any new addition to the others, as it added a lovely level of detail and charm!

The towers themselves were pretty self-explanatory: some would deal straight-up damage, such as one intermittently lugging bombs onto the passageway you are on and another spewing blistering flames in an arc. Others, however, can require a bit more forethought. For example, you may find a smithy that increases the damage of any nearby towers, or you might have a bank that slowly accrues funds. The variety of different options to pick from and the importance of placement make for an abundance of possible playing styles and tactics, making each run end with a completely different home for any monarch.

Now, focusing on defence is all well and good, but regretfully, architecture of this scale is not cheap, which is where the peon we control comes in. In addition to fighting hordes and deciding where to place towers, we are also tasked with keeping an eye out for useful resources. Chopping down wood will increase our offensive capabilities, whereas mining rocks or gold will repair your home and enable you to buy more goodies later, respectively. The real fun and chaos of Monsters are Coming is found in the balancing of these mechanics as you make a run around in a panic.

As I mentioned, the game is a roguelite of sorts, so once you either defeat the boss at the end of the road or your castle will be destroyed, the run will end, and you’ll take it from the top. However, you do have a few things working in your favour from one attempt to another! Meta-currency can be used to add improvements to your little peon, increasing their damage output, running speed, or other attributes. You can also unlock new types of towers to add to the pool of options, in addition to finding new types of cities to try out in a run.

In our 45-minute demo, my colleague and I were able to play two instances of the game at once, so we did what all good colleagues do: competed and threw shade to no end! In my run, I had a strong start with a few ice dragon towers that slowed the hordes down enough for me to gather a healthy bit of resources. My lack of planning, however, was my undoing as I added structures without a proper system, allowing my enemies to chip away at my walls. Though I picked up a cool boomerang and some more ice-towers, my run ended as I ran into the big bad at the end. My colleague, who is a smart man, actually picked synergistic options and utility buildings. Short story shorter, he was very smug.

The finished game is set to offer four different biomes to fight through and ten different cities with their own unique twists to gameplay. Though we don’t have a release date yet, Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road already shows promise and adds a much-needed change to a slightly stagnated genre.