Our Rating
North Tower is a game that relies heavily on its graphics and slow progression pace to cover for its lack of content depth. While the game does have plenty of stuff for you to do, it does a poor job of introducing the mechanics to you in a manner that will retain your interest. There’s an in-game town, an expedition system, a complete campaign, as well as dungeons, but it seems like these features were checklists for the developers to complete instead of them being well thought-out and integrated into the core game mechanics.
Gameplay
Monetization
Content
We initially covered this game as part of our list of the best Idle Tower Defense games, and this game provides you with exactly what it advertises. A beautiful presentation of idle TD elements combined with a standard merge game. You are defending a dragon sitting atop a tower as enemies spawn and make their way towards it.
Gameplay
During the early game, you will be manually selecting targets for the dragon to attack. Soon after though, you will unlock the auto attack toggle which will let you finish battles without having to invest any time yourself. Unfortunately, you still need to manually start the battles to progress through the game.
You need to beat missions in the main campaign to unlock other parts as well, these include the wharf, events, your town, as well as additional units, heroes, and dragons. Here’s what everything does:
- Island – This place acts as your “home”, kind of. We thought the home would be the tower you are spending so much time defending, but apparently not. The island is where all the menus are hidden away behind buildings,
- The Academy is where you view cards of all the monsters in the game.
- The Mailbox is where you get random gifts and rewards from events.
- The Shop is where you spend your hard-earned dollars on microtransactions.
- There’s a few more, but the Wharf deserves its own bullet point.
- Wharf – There are some games out there which let you send out a party of units on expeditions. These units can bring back rewards and other bounty if the expedition is successful. The Wharf is exactly that, you have boats, you send the boats out on expeditions to bring you back loot.
- Events – In some other party-based idle games, you have dungeons where you can send your party off to for rewards and bonuses. These events are very similar in nature and design as well. With scaling difficulty and generous rewards, you’ll have fun until you hit a wall.
Monetization
You might not like what we have to say about this, but we didn’t really have a problem with the way monetization works in North Tower. For the most part, things were pretty standard, like a no-ads package and some QoL in exchange for loyalty in the shape of VIP rewards.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of RNG involved when rolling cards and you might get some unlucky streaks in the process. We generally dislike Gacha mechanics but in our experience we did not feel limited by the game’s monetization practices at all. It’s a game meant to be played when you’re on a break and it’s best you keep it for that. The offline progression is also fairly limited for new players, to only two hours of away-earnings, you are incentivized to keep checking the game throughout the day, something we don’t particularly like or approve of.
Content
We already discussed most of North Tower’s content in our gameplay section, but we skipped talking about the Merge mechanics until now so we can delve into them further.
The game’s merge mechanics are fairly straight forward, you pull additional units by using gold. The gold is earned as a reward for missions, events, and as an idle currency. But the costs scale up much faster than your idle earnings so if you have come to North Tower in hopes to find a merge game then look elsewhere.
North Tower has incredible graphics, a wide selection of content, but the game feels unpolished.
