Review: Gnomes (PC)

There was a brief period of time where the tower defence genre was a big deal and just about everyone was trying to get on board with it, right through to the biggest publishers. It’s easy to understand why – the games are relatively easy to develop, and it’s relatively easy to fill them with content. The genre has faded into the background as other things have come to the fore in the indie spaces – roguelikes, for example – but every so often something like Gnomes comes out to remind us just how good this genre can be.

There are a couple of things that help Gnomes immediately stand out, even if you’ve played a lot of tower defence titles. The first is the fact that between waves of enemies you can move your gnome warriors (the “towers”) around the environment. Enemies come in totally different paths with each wave, and you can see the paths they’ll take via a dotted line. By placing gnomes in the pathways you can actually force them to redirect, and by doing this cleverly and creatively you can create deadly chokepoints and concentrate your firepower.

It’s important to do this because enemies can (and will) end up having paths that will destroy valuable resources on you. For example, you might have a woodcutter building that provides cash with every wave based on the number of nearby trees. If an enemy path cuts through those trees they’ll destroy your resources on you, so finding a way to manipulate the flow of enemies elsewhere (without resulting in your lines of defence becoming weak) is critical. I’ve never had so much fun with the “downtime” between waves of enemies in a tower defence than I have with Gnomes. It has the same kind of whimsical, freely creative spirit that encourages you to come up with screenshot-able spaces that a Rollercoaster Tycoon does, and it was off to a great start with me immediately because it felt like it rewarded creative play.

The other great feature that differentiates Gnomes from other tower defence titles is the variety of factions that there are to play with. There are 16 different choices, and each choice has its own building, unit type, resource source, and unique item. Thanks to this each faction plays totally differently. Some factions are significantly easier than others… and I suspect that for people who get really hooked on Gnomes those tougher options will be the favourites.

Then there are eight different maps to play on, and once you get past a certain point (setting a decent score on the third easiest map) you also unlock alternative ways to play, including a daily run. The sheer amount of content here means that you’ll be unlocking new toys to play around with for a big chunk of your first few hours with the game, and after that, you’ll be ready to settle in and try and chase those high scores.

I feel like there’s a lot that we can thank Vampire Survivors for, and one of the big things is the way that the game’s progression systems work. Gnomes seems to be a student of Vampire Survivors, and it is every bit as moreish as that indie behemoth. In fact, this is one of those rare games that had me staying up until 2am playing (when I really should have been focusing on working on my own game). It has that fleetingly rare “just one more turn” quality in spades.

Also like Vampire Survivors, Gnomes has an appealing lo-fi pixel aesthetic quality and straightforward, functional presentation. It’s not unpleasant by any means, though it is perhaps a little lacking in creative ambition – it’s generic, basically. We’ve been looking at this kind of lo-fi fantasy aesthetic and almost exactly these kinds of sprites and environmental items since the visual Rogue and Nethack days.

On the other hand, the development team is all of two people and the game file is about 20mb – yes, MB – and given how compelling the underlying mechanics are, you’re not going to stop playing it just because it won’t be winning awards for original art.

Gnomes is one of those games that is just clever, and if there’s any justice in the world it will have a similar trajectory ahead of it that Vampire Survivors did. It’s immediately accessible, both devilishly challenging and rewarding, and almost impossible to put down.