The success of many of the best indie games has been built on daring to combine elements in ways that are unexpected, yielding new takes on gameplay that are fresh but still familiar. Of course, for every game that performs some sort of alchemy to turn itself into gold there are plenty that fizzle out and fail to bring everything together successfully. Becastled, I suppose, has a decent concept. By day you’ll work to transform what starts as a humble town into something more grand and elaborate by managing your workers, collecting resources, and building new structures. Then by night you’ll need to be ready to defend what you’ve built from steadily-growing threats, requiring a different set of strategies.

In general I’d say the end of the experience that feels better fleshed out is the city-building side. For anyone familiar with the genre there’s very little new here of note, and if anything it feels pretty shallow. You’ll need to set up the proper structures next to the appropriate resources, assign your workers, build houses to help your population to grow, etc. There’s a component where you’ll ideally try to keep your people happy as well, though how critical that is to your ultimate success I also didn’t explore, as setting up a structure or two to keep folks from feeling unruly is a fair compromise.

Where I’d say the experience struggles, and even falters a bit, is when night falls and you’ll need to manage your defenses. I absolutely wouldn’t refer to this phase as a form of tower defense, as in my mind that would imply you having far more capabilities provided to you than you’ll find. Managing your troops is more cumbersome than it should be, and with other indie titles like Thronefall, the Kingdom Rush series, or even the Kingdom series all working far more easily and efficiently, I found Becastled’s implementation to be quite painful by comparison. The elements that work by day easily enough don’t feel like they extended well into the night, so even within the game there feels like a bit of a disconnect. In the end this just feels like an odd pairing of two gameplay styles I’m not sure anyone was clamoring to see together. It may be implemented reasonably well, but each part fails to meet or exceed the expectations within their own spaces on the console. Combining them as well didn’t do either any obvious favors either, making it an odd release.