Epic Empire Review

Developed by Upscale Studio, Epic Empire is a vibrant tower defence title that brings a traditional strategy experience to the Xbox. The core loop involves protecting your kingdom from relentless waves of enemies by strategically placing defensive structures. As to be expected if too many enemies breach your base and your health hits zero, the mission ends in failure.

While it follows the classic tower defence blueprint, Epic Empire introduces layers of complexity through its “Elite Heroes.” These can be unlocked by using gems that are earned through progression and completing stages so you can pick a play style that suits you. These specialised units ranging from the durable tank Sir Agnar, Archer named Allana to attack from a distance and many more. They are deployed on the battlefield and can be moved at any given time to help you out in a pinch.

Each hero has a role to play and up to 3 can be equipped at any time to mix and match the type of defence you want to play each with an array of special abilities you can train up to do more damage or aid you. Each hero has individual stats and attacks and later you can enhance their power by equipping runes and levelling up accompanying pets that give them a further boost. Special attacks and abilities can be deployed to help when in a pinch and has a cooldown timer making every moment matter as you never know when you need to fend off a larger group of enemies.

Resource management is key in this genre, and you can get overwhelmed early on if you spend gold to build towers very early on. You need to balance the type of towers you deploy as certain enemy types are unaffected by ground units or arial bombardment. Rather than building towers in every given area it is sometimes wiser to invest in upgrading your current towers that will cut through the enemies and deal more damage. The more enemies you kill the more gold stacks up, but you have to keep up to speed and figure out Risk VS Reward as your heroes and towers can take damage so it’s about futureproofing the exit and getting heroes out of harm’s way before being caught out and losing all your lives and failing.

The progression in the game is very simple, the better you do and less damage taken you are rewarded stars as an indicator of how successful you were. Gems are rewarded to invest in your characters and abilities to prep for the tougher and longer waves. Heroes then earn XP that allow you to train abilities that require the cooldown which helps out in the long run, and you can also revisit levels and up the difficulty for extra rewards and a bit more of a challenge.

At a price point of £8.39, Epic Empire offers a solid value for fans of the genre. It doesn’t try to be flashy and sometimes it is a bit clunky in the UI trying to set up attacks and units but the fun addition of hero management and chasing the progression system to max out heroes can make it an engaging experience and keeps you guessing what enemies you have to deal with next.