The Gate Must Stand blends two genres that I have mixed feelings towards. The first is, I believe, called Survivors-like these days, though I’ve also heard ‘Bullet Heaven’. That might be a different thing. It’s a little confusing. Anyway, it’s a genre I’ve historically not clicked with, though recent offerings have made things a bit more palatable. The other one is Tower Defence, which I have different feelings towards. It’s a genre I’ve always liked, but I’ve recently come to terms with the fact that I’m terrible at it. I can’t even claim old age slowing me down. Partly because I’m only thirty-three, but mostly because I’ve always been rubbish at them.
Yet the combination of the two leads to something interesting. They feed into each other really well. While you’re up in the frontlines slicing up the big baddies, your archers and mages are in the background dealing with the minions. The more you look at it, the more you realise that The Gate Must Stand has tapped into one of those ideas that seems like it should have been obvious. It’s an evolution of the action game and tower defence combos that were all the rage a while back. The Gate Must Stand is pretty rough around the edges though, and feels like it’s trying to pull too much from too little. Cracking title though.
Man The Gate!
The Gate Must Stand‘s loop is a pretty straightforward one. The set up is this: big ole monsters are coming. They like to destroy things, and the heroes would rather they didn’t. In order to get to the townsfolk, the monsters have to break through three gates. That’s where we come in. Us and the lone archer on the wall, anyway. We pick a hero, start at the first gate, and begin carving up the minions. As we play, we can grab various units from the tavern and dot them around. They, and us, will continually chip away at the growing horde of monsters. We need to hold for twenty minutes, before moving on to the next gate.
I really enjoy this blend. The two sides play off each other very well. The tower defence side allows you to think tactically. You can put down fences to corral minions, so it naturally leads to the creation of choke points. As you progress, you unlock more units that give you more options. I liked the fire elementals, who laid down magma, giving units a big stack of burn. Couple of them at the top end and everything was crispy. Then the survivors-like elements allow you to get stuck in and deal damage to priority targets. The tower defence stops the survivors-like from becoming boring; the survivors-like stops the tower defence from dragging the pacing down. Great fun.
Running In Cycles
The Gate Must Stand also has a nice variety of heroes to choose from. I tended to stick to the melee focused ones myself. Like the Rogue and their special ability to just go nuts in an area around them. Still, once you’ve figured out the trick for each hero, it’s very easy for The Gate Must Stand to get caught in a loop. After defending a gate, your hero and all your troops are reset. So you basically have to build yourself back up to where you were each time. Presumably this is for the sake of challenge, but it makes one run feel like three runs that keep getting cut off after twenty minutes. The relatively small pool of maps and bosses exacerbates the issue, making things feel very repetitive in the back half.
What’s more, there’s a general rough feel to things. The art isn’t too bad, with the character designs looking quite nice, but I feel like the general style struggles to stand out. It has the feel of something cooked up in the Flash game era, with no cohesive thread of monster designs. Everything feels a bit thrown in there. It’s also a little buggy at times, with creatures getting stuck in corners. There’s one type of monster, the fish, that can seemingly hit the gate despite being nowhere near it. That’s a little frustrating. It gives something of a ramshackle feel to things. I see that they did have to revert an art update recently, which gives some reason for this feeling at the moment. Here’s hoping they can tighten things up.
The Gate Must Stand – Great Idea In Need Of Polish
There are different difficulty tiers mind you, which do add new elite units to the mix. That did breathe some life back into things, but again it tends to fall apart in the back half. An hour is a long time to be doing the same things over and over. There are also permanent upgrades across runs, but that’s more of a numbers game than anything. In the end, I found myself starting up The Gate Must Stand with great enthusiasm that started ticking away towards the end. The curse of the roguelike strikes again. It’s still a thumbs up from me, and something I intend to keep an eye on, it just needs to differentiate itself a bit more.
The new maps and bosses coming in the roadmap is a good start. But I feel like The Gate Must Stand needs something other than just more of the same. In my opinion, the gates should all feel different from each other. Even if that’s just making the flow of one horizontal, rather than vertical. Something that screams ‘this is gate two and things are getting serious’. As it was, I ended up constantly forgetting whether I was on gate two or three. Other than a few monster skin changes, they didn’t feel that different. Still, the actual core idea of The Gate Must Stand has a lot of potential. With a bit of boot polish, I feel like it could be a fantastic game.
