"Synergy-stacking shop gamble that clicks, until Grandmaster turns to dice"
About
Oaken Tower is an auto battler where you don't control units in a fight. You build a stack of items in your tower during a shop phase, then it fights another player's tower automatically and you watch the result. The shop works like a slot machine: you spend gold, reroll for items, and try to line up synergies across tribes such as Elven, Fire, Storm, Arcane, and Goblin. Matches are asynchronous PvP, so you're pitted against snapshots of other players' builds rather than live opponents, and rounds are short. You climb a ranked ladder up to Grandmaster, chase unlocks, and can push runs into an endless mode. It's a solo-developer project in Early Access from Bocary Studios.
Verdict
Oaken Tower nails the part that matters: the moment you spot a synergy in the shop and greed for the piece that makes it explode. It's a lot of game for a solo developer at eight euros, and the fast rounds make experimenting cheap. The trouble waits at Grandmaster, where scaling luck and lopsided matchmaking turn good runs into coin flips, and the endgame build pool feels thinner than the early hours promise. As an Early Access release those are exactly the balance problems a solo dev has room to fix, and the foundation is worth backing now.
You'll like it if …
- +You enjoy chasing item synergies and resetting fast after a bad draw
- +Asynchronous PvP suits you because you'd rather race a snapshot than sit through live turns
- +You like a shop gamble and don't mind the reroll deciding a run's ceiling
You'll dislike it if …
- −You want ranked climbs where skill beats scaling variance every time
- −A meta that narrows to one optimal build kills your interest
- −You need a story or characters to stay with a game
Breakdown
- +The shop-and-reroll loop rewards a clear thought each round: which synergy to commit to, when to greed for one more item.
- +Rounds resolve fast, so a losing build stings for seconds rather than minutes before you're back tuning the next one.
- +Wild item combinations pay off visibly, and stumbling onto a runaway multicast or scaling engine is the hook that pulls the next match.
- −At Grandmaster the matchmaking throws you against opponents who have scaled two or three times harder, and the loss reads as a dice roll rather than a mistake you made.
- −Runs that end at 9 wins out of 10 to a wildly outscaled tower turn the climb sour at the top.
- +Tribes, starting perks, and item interactions stack into a genuinely wide build space, and few games open the same way twice.
- +The systems look simple on day one, then the synergy math between melee and range, tribes and perks opens up once you know the pool.
- −The endgame meta narrows hard: several high-rank players report the viable roster collapsing toward a single dominant build instead of a handful.
- −Progression leans on the slot-machine shop, so a run's ceiling is often set by what the rerolls offer rather than how you played it.
- +The art direction and clean board reading get consistent praise, and the music holds a calm tone that suits short sessions.
- −A recent graphics overhaul splits players: effects pile up until the board is harder to parse, and some call it a step down from the demo's look.
- −Long-run players describe the effects as hard on the eyes when several synergies fire at once.
- +The UI flows well and the game loads in a couple of seconds, so you can rattle off three or four matches in the time one round takes elsewhere.
- +Performance is stable for most players.
- −Overlapping inventory slots make it easy to sell an item you meant to keep, a mistake the interface invites.
- −Managing potions is fiddly, with some that can't be used and have to be deleted by hand, and there's no auto-sort.
- −Scattered reports of Linux disconnects and crashes when the inventory overflows.
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