Gargadusa's Tower

I'm going to sink 300+ hours into this, I can already tell. It's like when I first discovered OOTP. This is the best game I've played in several years - or maybe more fairly the game which best matches my tastes anyway. It's exactly what it looks like. Football Manager or OOTP except you're running adventuring parties and guild stuff. It's incredibly deep. It's not half assed like you see with most small devs on a first release. It's hardcore. The interface is pretty complex. Look at the pictures and you'll see 13 tabs and if you click one of those you go to a submenu with more tabs. There's a lot of minor stuff that isn't really explained that well or hidden behind a button that you didn't see. It takes an exceptionally engaging game to to make a player work through an interface like that and figure things out particularly in the modern era. This is such a game. This probably isn't worth mentioning but in the mid-2000's I tried to write a game very much like this with VB6. I spent months on that thing... I had adventurers with myers-briggs personality types (these guys use the zodiac) in how they related to each other and so on. It didn't pan out, but Gargadusa's Tower is better than what I even imagined my game becoming when I dreamed it up and was super optimistic. This game isn't perfect. They allow you to transfer characters to other guilds like players on a sports team, and sometimes you get offers from other teams. Sounds great. But the penalties for transferring characters (morale loss for all remaining guild members and a hefty negotiating penalty when signing new characters) are so harsh that in practice it's best not to use this feature at all. Saving is clunky. There's an autosave but it doesn't always work, and saving manually involves too many steps considering how important it is and how often you use it. Still, $8.99 for this is really low. They're asking like $40 for whatever it is they're doing with OOTP these days and this is more enjoyable than OOTP. Very engaged dev. Easily worth full price if you have any interest in text based sims. If you read my reviews I am not a suckass who writes glowing reviews for everything. A fair amount are negative and even my positive reviews are normally noncommittal, but this game is outstanding and I hope it becomes a hit.

This is manager slop (or number go up slop). There are so many parts of this game that are basically independent of each other or negligible. The amount of completely benign text that gets spat onto your screen for no other reason than forcing you to scroll through menus (at least that's the end result). The classes are just trait carriers no functional difference other than increasing number. The crafting system is pointless. The training system is worthless. Ultimately it is just a time waste and you get nothing for it. This is an AI generated game and it shows. The worst part of all this is that the idea here is good/excellent. I so desperately wish that development/creative time was spent to flesh out this idea further.

It's all right. It's basically a football/sport manager game, but for a fantasy guild. I've already got my first party of adventurers running and it's been interesting as I pile up my gold. I'm now scouring the field of applicants for better-quality recruits and hope to make a second party. My MAJOR CRITICISM is how "AI generated" the whole game feels. Alot of the text in the game is just unnecessarily verbose and grandeur. Ditto with patch notes. Besides that, if you LOVE numbers and collecting heroes like they're pokemon, I think this game is good enough, especially for its cheap price. I wish there were more graphics in the game rather than just text and numbers, but eh, it does its job. The soundtrack is beautiful.

As someone that has logged 100's of hrs in OOTP and Football Coach: College Dynasty, if you love statistical and management sports games, then this is 10/10 and you need to play it.

Too much AI speak in the text. So convoluted for no reason. Like it's trying to hit a word count.

Gargadusa Tower is an awesome and unbelievably deep game, a guild simulator I was looking for years. I have already sank 150 hours in the game and expect to play a lot more as new features are added. But I do have a pet peeve. After half a dozen playthroughs and fiddling with the extensive difficulty setting I simply can't feel the WORLD ENDING THREAT THAT HAS DEVOURED HUNDREDS OF GUILDS! I mean I just finished a run where I had perposedly used only F and D rank adventurers, maxed out the OVR setting on both the world quests and the Tower, even added a death floor but... There was no failure to be had at least in the tower. Every opponent fell at the first go. Sure there were casualties in some but the whole fortification system and the upgrades that help you overcome tower raid failures feel completely overfluous. Needless to say that parties staffed with higher tier adventurers simply bulldoze through. You need to do something completely insane like maxing out the death floor and lethality slider to actually feel some presure, combat wise always, in a standard game and that should not be so. There are other modes like the academy only runs that promise long campaigns but even so, please fix the difficulty so that the tower can be the lethal challenge the lore demands

This game is pretty great actually. Very much a sports management game except it's a fantasy RPG as well. Don't let the AI tag scare you, it's just the character portraits which they say will be replaced as early access continues. I would certainly like something better there but it has nothing to do with the gameplay itself.

Pretty much a perfect management game. Glad I stumbled across this game (and the book, which was even more of a pleasant surprise). The game and the book have been just what I've been craving the last few years. I think the only thing I would change (or ask for) is a small guild option/guild scale limit. I would probably like this game even more, if I was limited to 25–30 adventurers because I would be even more invested in everyone in my guild rather than a few standout or project adventurers. 5/5

I like the idea, but the generic AI generated UI and frankly terrible generated text lines spammed everywhere are not acceptable. Unfortunately you can smell the vibe code all over this project. It feels terribly disjointed as a result and no two systems really play well with each other. This game will need a massive refactor in order to salvage it. To be clear, I think the general idea of an OOTP baseball style guild management game is fantastic. However, every single aspect of the implementation here is painful. Finally, the AI disclosure on this game is clearly misleading as AI was used for far more than art assets.