When you’re dealing with indie games that have a gameplay style that isn’t that well or thoroughly represented on the system, it can sometimes be hard to figure out where to set the bar of quality. The lack of a sufficient number of benchmarks to compare to can make it tougher to feel like scoring is fair, whether you feel more positive or negative. However, even though Shieldwall has only a few games that feel like they’re in the same active real-time strategy style, it’s still unfortunately clear that it lacks in sustainable depth.

In it, you’ll take command of a variable team of warriors, facing off with up to 3 different teams, looking to control the majority of the total battlefield in order to bring victory. If you’re familiar with territorial control games, or even a game like capture the flag, you should get the general idea pretty quickly. Each team will be in a race to control new checkpoints while hopefully holding onto their own as long as possible. To do this effectively you’ll need to choose the right combination of troops that you’ll give general commands to, in order to take down enemy groups you’ll encounter, or at least slow them down while you turn tail to regroup.

The problem that arises, possibly before you’ve even completed the first campaign, is that it all gets to be very repetitive. Once you’ve earned your few upgrades, have as many unit options as possible (which isn’t many), and have worked out how best to work through your enemies, you’ll simply end up wandering around quite a bit. The enemy AI, which at first can at least seem competent, pretty quickly ends up feeling less formidable as well. When you see them often just lurking in a specific spot, rather than trying to take over more checkpoints, it becomes clear your opposition is pretty well slow-walking their campaign.

The other issue is that the few competing indie games that are already out there in roughly the same lane are at least more entertaining. Totally Accurate Battle Simulator doesn’t play things as straight, but its wider array of units and much more entertaining battles more than compensates by adding longevity. You also then have Besiege out there, which plays quite differently, but adds a construction component to the mix that can also be challenging and satisfying. Perhaps if you could play against other humans, Shieldwall could have at least felt more engaging, but as it is it simply loses steam too quickly by falling into repetition.