Ancient Warriors is a wave defense game sporting a nice pixel art aesthetic. The game may look good and play fine, but many positive reviews extravagantly praising the game’s features made me suspicious. Regardless, I decided to give Ancient Warriors a try, and while it is certainly a decent game, I can’t help but feel like there’s some conspiracy around the game’s positive ratings and its publisher.
Keep in mind that this is still a fair review and something a prospective buyer should definitely know.
Like I said before, Ancient Warriors is a wave defense game, like Plants vs Zombies, for anyone familiar with that franchise. The goal is simple: Spawn friendly units of your own and use traps and peaceable defenses to prevent your enemies from reaching your side of the screen. Allies move forward to attack advancing enemies, and the whole thing is generally a tug-of-war experience where you have a defensive advantage, whereas the computer has an offensive one.
Despite a lack of tutorials, you’ll get the hang of the game by the first level. Since there aren’t as many options to begin with, it will be easy for you to understand everything, even if each deployable unit has a brief description like “Attack 5 Health 7, Attacks in an area.”
Your entire arsenal in Ancient Warriors consists of four units and five or six traps or peaceable objects. This unimpressive roster is made all the more confusing when you realize that some units (namely, the knight and the slime) have the same stats and have no distinguishable purpose other than not sharing a cooldown timer.
The roster of enemies, however, is far more varied, featuring goblins, orc-like monsters, shadow creatures, giant hats, and exploding… chicken… things? And other really interesting foes. I love the game’s roster of enemies; they feel very creatively designed. I did, however, make the mistake of assuming that there would be new enemies at each level; There aren’t. You simply see the harder ones earlier as you progress deeper into the game, which was a big disappointment.
This absence of variety leads to an overwhelming lack of strategic depth in the game. You will often see your side of the screen pushed in early in a match, but if you place everything available as soon as it comes off cooldown, you will inevitably end up in a stalemate in the center of the map. There isn’t much to do strategy-wise and levels sort of feel drawn out as you fight the cooldown timers as best you can.
What the game does do incredibly well is the animation. Each character on the map features surprising attention to detail in their animations, even down to the knight’s hair flowing in the wind as he charges the right side of the screen. With their flailing, thrashing arms, the shadow-army enemy type is especially fun to see animated.
Ancient Warriors is an alright wave defense game that would be great as a mobile title or a $5 purchase. That being said, it stands at an egregious $29.99 on Steam, a price that anyone who would play the game would certainly complain about even if they enjoyed it. Yet, the game sits at a positive Steam review rating. Why is this?
If you read the Steam description for Ancient Warriors, you’ll see it boasts the game’s strategic depth, unit variety, and legendary gameplay. The exact words include “Dynamic Enemy Variety” and “Powerful Arsenal.” One such braggadocious part of the description claims, “Call forth a variety of mighty warriors, each with unique abilities, to defend your kingdom against the relentless forces of evil.” This part is especially strange since no unique abilities exist for any unit in the game.
If you look into the comments, you can see very similar claims. In fact, you may see the exact same descriptions used for certain elements of the game. Of the game’s three positive reviews, each one boosts the game’s incredible amount of strategic depth and unit variety. One such review opens with:
“Ancient Warriors is a fantastic strategic defense game that definitely provides an engaging and exhilarating experience. From summoning warriors to setting up traps and utilizing a powerful arsenal, this game offers a plethora of options to fend off waves of diverse enemies.”
Steam Review
If these reviews seem too good to be true or far-fetched, given the game I just described, you’d be right. In my opinion, this sounds like a situation where these reviews are falsified and even paid for by the developers.
As someone who writes for a living, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the ChatGPT program. While I don’t use the program myself, I’ve trained my eye to read the patterns in AI-generated publications, which isn’t hard to do. I believe there is a certain lack of humanity and repetition in word choice that is pretty obvious once you get to know the program. In my own opinion, I will confidently say that both the reviews for Ancient Warriors and the game’s description are written exclusively by AI.
I feel this trend follows with the rest of this developer’s products, of which there are many. From my point of view, all of Galsoozka’s games have highly positive reviews and price tags that I would argue are excessive for the games in question. It doesn’t take much to conclude that this developer may be purchasing botted reviews to inflate the sales numbers of their games artificially.
The Final Word
As a game, Ancient Warriors is a fine, if underwhelming and overpriced, wave defense title with some great pixel art. However, some seemingly questionable practices on behalf of the developers mean players should exercise caution when checking out this title, as not all that is promised is delivered.
5
Ancient Warriors was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Ancient Warriors is available on Steam.