Preview: Ark of Charon has Legs, But a Wonky Foundation

By taking a classic base-building/castle defense set-up and making it mobile, I feel Ark of Charon introduces some new quirks to a well-worn formula. But while it’s certainly promising, it is also evident this Early Access title has some issues for Angoo and Sunsoft to work out if they want it to grow as strong and tall as the tree creatures within it.

The game itself plays as more of a colony-sim than its city-builder cousin The Wandering Village, and sees you taking care of a four-legged tree creature that is the sole offspring of the life-sustaining worldtree. As you travel the realm you’ll need to defend it from attacking hordes of creatures, which you accomplish by building a bloody great fortress on the poor creature’s back.

The building system looks simple, thanks to the side-on perspective, but each block you place has a weight and a bearing strength characteristic that prevents you building an enormous tower out of wood, or building too far out without support. As you progress through the technology screen you’ll unlock new materials to construct from, with sturdier materials letting you build taller structures as well as being better at withstanding attacks. You’ll also get new crafting stations and defensive emplacements as you’d expect, though there’s a few issues that can make progression unsatisfying or even tedious at times.

The first is that the tech tree is laid out kind of flatly, so you have basic techs like cooking and mining next to mortar emplacements and laser cannons without any pre-requisites. They each cost the same, too, so if you’re not careful you could find yourself accidentally spending your precious technology points on something you won’t have the means to construct for quite some time. It also just lacks that general flow tech trees usually have, telling you subtly what sort of things you ought to be starting with before building up to more complicated technologies.

The second issue is thornier, and involves those structure upgrades. Say you’ve just unlocked stone or steel buildings, you’ll likely want to start putting the plans to use right away. Except before you can really get to expanding your base with them you’re first going to need to go back and replace all your old wooden structures first so they don’t collapse under the weight of your new ones. Pillars and tiles are easy enough to upgrade by simply building the new one over them, but buildings can only be upgraded like this if the new blueprint fits perfectly over the old, which they rarely do. So you end up having to deconstruct and mess around with your layout every time you unlock new building parts, which completely buries the joy of getting new stuff under a load of busywork. It’s a neat idea, it just doesn’t shake out mechanically and it only gets worse the more you have to replace.

The combat is a simple case of building turrets in good firing positions, with damage bonuses based on how high you can get them. You have to manage ammunition supplies as well, but you can also take manual control of one of your emplacements to do some shooting yourself. It’s fairly spartan for now, but with a few more enemy and weapon types I could see this really influencing how you design your castle layout.

Then there’s Ark of Charon‘s pack-up-and-move mechanic, which is fun not just because you’re no longer confined to just the map you start on, but because different areas hold different resources in abundance. You can decide you need to stock up on stone, and make a bee-line for a rocky area with lots of deposits. Even the enemies you face can change, which is important because collecting the souls of downed foes is how you reconstitute more golems, with different soul types boosting the speed of certain actions.

The downside is thematic rather than mechanical, as I couldn’t help but feel like a greedy swarm of locusts stripping an area of natural resources before moving on. It’s just a little at odds with Ark of Charon‘s whole “save the big tree to reinvigorate life” setup, which isn’t helped by how little the sapling creature really factors into things. Some bonuses for building affinity with the creature would be nice, especially after letting you name it. Mine’s called “Shrubby”.

So there are a few flaws in the foundation, and a few areas that need a bit more meat to them, but otherwise Ark of Charon has a lot of room to grow. Providing the developers can find a way to wrangle those issues, I’ll looking forward to seeing how it shapes up after a period in Early Access.

Ark of Charon is immediately available for PC via Steam Early Access.