Otherwar – PS5 Review

Otherwar is a tower defence game and it comes to use from Polish devs Kantal Collective.  Originally released in 2023 on Steam, the game is now available on PSN and we were pretty excited to try out a tower defence game, a once dominant genre that has fallen out of favour thanks to a slew of post-Vampire Survivors rogue-lites.

Although the setting, defending the Gates of Heaven from the hordes of Hell, is pretty grand, the game only offers up a handful of static images as any kind of story.  That’s all pretty easy to ignore.  But then you’ll get a handy tutorial that explains the main mechanics.

You play as a lone angel who has to stop waves of demonic foes from reaching the gates.  You’ve got two main ways of doing this.  The first is that the angel can shoot at enemies thanks to the twin-stick set-up (bonus points awarded as the right-stick aims and shoots) and to back this up they can construct towers that, like any game in this genre, you place in spaces alongside the track that enemies travel down.

Your towers will auto-attack anyone in range and you’ll need to consider which tower types to buy, where to place them and when to upgrade.  There’s also a bit of a “bullet hell” element as some enemies can shoot projectiles at you and if you don’t deal with them quickly, you’ll soon find yourself under a lot of pressure as you try to navigate through the various fireballs, homing eyeballs and blades that’ll come your way.

There are ten types of tower and most of these get unlocked as you progress through the game’s nine main stages.  You get single, double and triple-firing towers, one that freezes, another that slows, an area attack one, one that boosts adjacent towers, one that takes out enemy projectiles, a laser tower and, finally, a treasury tower (that passively raises money so that you can buy more towers quicker).  You can only place a limited number of each in any stage, so you need to use a bit of judgment to figure out how best to set up your defences.

And, on the face of it, Otherwar does a pretty good job.  The mechanics are deep enough but not complicated or any kind of faff to learn.  The mix of twin-stick shooting and tower defence works pretty well.  The interface is relatively intuitive too.  But there are some downsides to the game.

The issue with a lot of games in the genre is that generally you’re not powerful enough to win and have to sort of brute force your way through the games with upgrades.  That’s kind of the case here.  And when you do eventually get powerful enough to turn the tide, you then become a bit unstoppable.  If you want to do well on the game, even on the hardest setting, all you really need are the damage and attack speeds for your angel’s primary weapon and the upgrade that makes them fire a triple shot.

Combine that with a layout of two treasury towers and as many single-firing towers as you can buy and you’ll be golden but in reality your angel’s triple shot ability will allow you to kill almost anything before it even gets a chance to establish itself on the screen.  It’s like the game doesn’t quite nail the difficulty curve.  We completed the game on Normal and had all the available upgrades by then and it made playing it on Hard completely trivial.  Indeed the only real challenge then is to get some of the specific level objectives done.

Also, the visual style may not appeal to a lot of players.  It’s all done in a fairly drab, pixelated style and while it’s similar to one of our favourite ever games, Loop Hero, it’s not the most attractive style.  It does keep the action relatively clear to read though so it is at least practical but there’s not much variation between any of the levels and just not much visual interest.

But, with all that said, we actually really enjoyed Otherwar and were happily on our way to getting the Platinum but there appear to be a couple of unobtainable trophies (the game version is shown as 1.0, so there are probably a few patches incoming) so that eventually scuppered us but not before beating the game on Normal and Hard.  A trio of endless levels await if they ever patch the game.  And the game did crash a couple of times on us (both times at the end of a level, frustratingly).  But, in that sweet spot where the game isn’t too difficult and too easy, this is a fun game and a welcome return to a genre that still has a bit of life left in it.