Introduction

To this day, I remember reading a forum post about the upcoming 2009 Nintendo DS game "Knights In The Nightmare" that read "It's simple, though. Knights really isn't too different from the other stylus-driven bullet hell strategy RPGs out there." In actuality Knights's bullet "hell" leans a lot more towards Undertale than Touhou, but otherwise, it's an accurate and funny introduction that fully reveals the game's seeming incongruousness while cooly inviting you to step past it and take it in stride. And so it is with Titanium Court: it really isn't too different from the other metatextual match-3 strategy roguelites out there.

More seriously, I feel getting caught up on defining games in terms of what genre signifiers they indulge in, or what the gameplay does or does not resemble, is ultimately a forest-for-trees mistake. If I had to define Titanium Court, I'd say: it's a randomised run-based game with mechanical and narrative metaprogression. Which is to say, it's very much a 2020's game, through and through.

I've noticed this surface-level view of the gameplay also dominates most reviews and impressions of the game - while its first-blush appearance is flashily novel, little attention is spent examining whether or not it has the staying power that run-based games require. Though this is understandable, given how appealing the game's appealing narrative and its progression is, I nonetheless wanted to give the world a review of this title that examines the gameplay a lot more closely. And so, here is a gameplay-only review.

I should mention that this review discusses very little to nothing of the game's narrative, but if you wish to avoid any whiff of the unexpected, you have my wishes to adieu.

Overview

Titanium Court's core loop is very familiar to narrative roguelite players: you alternate between talking to characters in a hub and attempting runs to beat a series of random levels, and in doing so, make progress on various characters' routes and the overall plot. In each level, manipulate the battlefield using match-3 rules in "High Tide", and then deploy units in "Low Tide". This game asks you to do a lot of runs - for a first-time playthrough, expect between 50 to 70 runs to reach the end. So, it's very important that the basic gameplay of these runs is either compelling enough (in the case of a traditional roguelike) or brief enough (in the case of a roguelite like Balatro) that the game doesn't become tedious or repetitive.

Unfortunately, the gameplay of runs, when played with serious intent, ultimately, inexorably converges on unexciting, defensive and risk-minimising play patterns. This is due to multiple factors: the "walling off" strategy to win levels, the difficulty of reliably obtaining good Low Tide units, and the randomness and lack of control inherent in the ruleset of High Tide. As a result, the strategy side of the game suffers (in my mind) quite considerably. While this isn't necessarily a problem when you're starting the game, I do think it harms its longevity over the full extent of a playthrough.

Strategies

You lose a run in Titanium Court (barring certain boss conditions) by allowing enemy units or attacks to reach and destroy the court. The game boasts three different strategies or ways to survive: pay for units to attack the approaching enemy in Low Tide, dismiss the enemy's keeps in High Tide by matching 3, or wall off the enemy in High Tide by arranging a barrier of impassable terrain. That last one is advertised as a main feature of the game - the store page's enticing declaration that you'll be "commanding the terrain itself to fall in your favor" is maybe the page's most eye-catching line. (While I personally feel match-3 gameplay doesn't quite approach the majesty and awe of that line, I won't argue that it doesn't describe, with a pinch of wordplay, what the game is about.)

Now, dismissing keeps is not really an overarching strategy - the match-3 rules (see "High Tide" below) limits when and how you can dismiss keeps - so much as something you need to situationally do on a case-by-case basis. Almost every level will require you to dismiss several lines of keeps in order to simply produce a playable board, but you can't rely on it entirely. As such, I think it's a surprisingly well-balanced mechanic.

Walling off

Meanwhile, walling off is extremely strong and very one-dimensional: it consumes no resources (unlike deploying units), doesn't require specific Low Tide units to match the enemy or terrain, doesn't require specific tile numbers and placements (such as three or more keeps to dismiss), easily renders very strong unit types (centaurs, gunboats, catapults) irrelevant, and can wall off any number of units (whereas dismissing keeps requires more and more moves as the number of keeps increases). Rather than just making the Low Tide phase of the battle easier, walling off lets you "win in High Tide" and more-or-less ignore the strategy portion of that level altogether.

Fig. 1 Because a wall of water tiles (blue and green) combined with land tiles (peach) separates the Court (far left) from all six red enemy units (which can cross one tile or the other but not both) the Court can deploy only resource-gathering units and ignore the entire map.

This wouldn't be too much of an issue if there were yet other motivations for engaging enemy units during Low Tide - for instance, the default Monarch job rewards you a certain currency for attacking keeps - but in my experience, the rewards for doing so are usually too low compared to the resource cost in deploying units. Many other jobs give nothing for engaging, beyond not losing the run. Moreover, only a few of the game's quests require engaging the enemy or deploying specific units, as opposed to simply surviving.

The only things that reliably force the player to engage the enemy are the bosses (and their existence also provides reason to gather different unit types) and even then, these can often be passed by either economic means (a resource payment) or by walling them off for 3 levels.

Player unit types and how they relate to the strategies

As mentioned above, walling off is a superior strategy because, among other things, it requires no specific units to perform. So, what units does the player generally have access to?

Well, the starting units of most jobs are bad at anything other that resource gathering. Very few jobs start with defensive units (or even offensive units), and the fact that offensives choose targets by themselves, and that you can't delay the deployment of offensive units on the timeline to indirectly control over which enemy units they will target, succeeds at making them feel distinct from defensives while also greatly reducing their utility. Offensives often require you to 'overdeploy' more units than you'd otherwise need, just to increase the likelihood that a mob of units, having been distracted away from the Court by another keep, are able to destroy the keep quickly enough that they can return in time to serve as a defense.

If there were very reliable ways to gain units and spells to grow your 'build' each run, such as guaranteed shops (as seen in some other roguelites), and thus have more options during Low Tide, I'd feel more kindly about the game's use of units - but most levels force you to choose between the shop and other amenities (if shops are even an option at all), and once there, High Tide often makes it difficult to ensure that you don't accidentally dismiss the shop or lose it to RNG chains (see below). While you can "reroll" the shop by dismissing it and rolling a new one from incoming tiles, so as to loosely control what the shop contains, such a reroll carries the risk of generating more random tiles and thus enemy keeps that often need to be dealt with as well.

Finally, some "units" are actually terrain-affecting spells, many of which either reward walling off, or make it much easier to accomplish - teleport spells to move the Court, spells that add water tiles beyond those present in High Tide, and other variants that disable or distract the enemy. While these tend to have a high resource cost, they are often far more cost-effective than deploying "real" units.

Digression 1: Missing tension

Aesthetically, I feel that Titanium Court is most fun, and has the greatest balance between its two modes, when you have sufficient opportunity, choice and reward to attack the enemy - only here is there that delicious tension between planning and execution that makes strategy games exciting. Deploying a soldier to destroy enemy units results in a long delay between your intent (to destroy the units) and the execution (whether or not the soldier successfully does so). High Tide strategies have no such tension, as the result of walling off the enemy (or using a spell to ward off) produces immediate results - one can simply look at the map to see whether all paths to the Court are blocked off. So, the fact that there is much less opportunity, choice and reward compared to "winning in High Tide" feels inarguably like a disappointment.

High Tide's rules

Let's move on to discussing High Tide. High Tide is Titanium Court's match-3 phase of battle. Its rules are Bejeweled's rules.

I'll just say it: I personally don't consider Bejeweled to be a good videogame. It is the 2048 of match-3, in that it dominates the public perception of the genre at the expense of more thoughtfully-designed competitors. And, like 2048, it could be good, but has two fundamental wrinkles that make the game far more random and the player far less empowered than what it could be: "RNG chains", where fresh randomly-generated tiles chain into existing ones, and the "all moves must match" rule, where moves to simply reposition tiles are not allowed.

To me, a high-quality ruleset for match-3 is something closer to Panel de Pon (leaving aside that game's real-time action aspect) - by allowing any two tiles to be swapped, chaining and combos of great size are supported, and the difference in value between short and long chains is enough that single 3-matches that lead to nothing are actively detrimental. To my dismay, Panel de Pon does still have RNG chains, but they are relatively infrequent (at least compared to Bejeweled).

Fig. 2. Panel de Pon gameplay at its most appealing. While most of the chaining in this game requires rapid real-time action, the core rules would still be compelling even if it was turn-based.

Let me discuss further how these two aspects force one to play High Tide very defensively.

"RNG Chains"

As said above, RNG chains are when newly generated tiles, that fall to replace a matched line or 3 or more, are naïvely generated such that they, simply by appearing, match and remove additional tiles without warning.

The crucial problem with RNG chains, in High Tide in particular, is that they make it impossible to determine whether any arbitrary clear will dismiss vital adjacent tiles. This is critical because A) once walling off the enemy, maintaining that wall at all costs is paramount, and B) you need amenity tiles (shops, chests) in great supply in each run, and if you lose them to an RNG chain late into High Tide, it's highly unlikely you have enough moves to regain them if they clear.

Fig. 3: one of many examples where RNG chains have to be considered. The hills and water create an impenetrable wall against these keeps' centaur units. It seems like the third and fourth columns can be safely lowered and the wall will be preserved… but if you roll a third water tile in column 3, then the water vanishes and a gaping hole appears in this wall. As such, if you have a low number of moves, you cannot lower column 3 without a risk of gaining a nearly unwinnable disadvantage.

As a result, it often means that the safest approach to High Tide is, once an even mildly favourable state is achieved, to stop engaging with it entirely, forego additional resource gain, and perform irrelevant moves (usually moving the Court back and forth) to consume your remaining time. If it was possible to have just a bit more control over what tiles are generated, such as a 'next' box for each column (available at no cost), then I'd feel far more positive about it, but as it is, High Tide feels hostile to the player, often randomly lashing out and disrupting their plans completely arbitrarily.

While some people tout this hostility as an advantage for the game - providing an often-huge detriment for matching tiles heedlessly - to me the novelty of this aspect of this design wears itself out quite fast.

Only matches are legal moves

Now, the must-match rule made sense for Bejeweled because it produced that game's only lose condition: lockout. However, it meant that the game itself gave you little control over constructing true chains (as compared to RNG chains), and in fact the need to identify any legal move often meant that casual Bejeweled play resembled a colourful word-search more than any risk-reward tension from constructing chaining forms. For this game, it means the amount of control you have during High Tide often fluctuates wildly between levels. In particular, arrangements of keeps or inopportune terrain generated in the lower half of the board (such as non-aligned groups of enemy keeps) are much more difficult to remove than those in the top, because there often aren't enough tiles below them to shift them, and only adding tiles from above is possible to disrupt their patterns.

Fig 4: an L in the corner of the field, like so, is essentially incapable of being removed except from above. These shapes, strong units, and inconvenient placement can often only be economically dealt with by walling off.

The only allowed non-matching moves involve moving the Court and owned properties, so while there's some recourse available if said patterns are adjacent to those tiles, it's often quite dangerous or inconvenient to do so. (It also, I feel, biases certain jobs or shop rolls that allow you to gain a lot of owned properties).

Digression 2: Techniques for dismissing keeps

That's not to say that both of these rules mean you're too limited in your ability to control things in High Tide. As you'll play, you'll find yourself noticing and becoming aware of a small handful of techniques to indirectly move tiles and dismiss a troublesome arrangement of keeps that, were free movement of every tile possible, would be relatively easy. There is some small delight to noticing these patterns and effortlessly using them as you get deeper into the game.

Fig. 5. This two-move technique allows you to dismiss diagonals, but it requires you to be able to sink the two right columns at once.

Fig. 6. This two-move technique dismisses an L-shape if you can sink the column of the L containing a single keep.

That said, since all of these rely on tiles below the structure in question to be removable, they can't be used on the lower half of the board. There, as discussed, you'll need to rely on tiles that you own (which are themselves quite rare to even obtain, and difficult to maneuver into position at short notice) to make otherwise impossible swaps. Since these swaps don't make matches, they consume more time in High Tide, making them even more inopportune.

Fig. 7. This barrier owned by the Court can be moved to create a match for these keeps. Of course, if you don't have enough High Tide moves left to complete the match, your barrier is left in a near-fatal position. Imagine if that was the Court itself…

Digression 3: but does it really matter?

Having discussed all of this quite thoroughly, one question remains: am I perhaps being too harsh and over-focusing on Titanium Court's strength as a replayable roguelite, when it clearly isn't trying to compete with the best or most replayable of the genre? Doesn't a lot of the theming around the game's runs emphasise that they're trivial and comical affairs, and shower you with opportunities to lower the difficulty or skip through it? And, aren't there a lot of weird combos you can perform - converting a massive keep to your side, mirrors multiplying units, using expensive destruction spells against bosses - that legitimise the rough or unpleasant edges?

Well, it's true that there are quite a lot of opportunities to skip or trivialise challenges in the game, many of which are comical or touching. But, to me, such a plethora of invitations to walk away from the challenge of the game feel like an admission that it can't actually stand up to this much scrutiny, and that investing effort into understanding and trying to master it is ultimately going to waste. So, while I appreciate that such options both exist and seamlessly blend into the texture of the game's world, they don't really put any of my concerns to rest.

I also feel like noteworthy or unusual events in the battles - not just unusual combos you can discover, but things like units going where you don't expect, flames spreading faster than you'd anticipated, and so forth - is indeed funny and wacky, but not quite funny or wacky enough to feel like the main draw, and certainly not funny or wacky enough on the second or third run in which it happens. if anything, having a very balanced and rock-solid foundation would, in my opinion, make the funny occurrences even funnier by pure contrast.

Final thoughts

OK, look, this whole review may seem like I'm down on Titanium Court as a skill-testing game. Rather, I merely think that the game presents an enticing combination of genres - match-3 and simple strategy and resource-management - but ultimately falls short on making both of them shine equally due to various seemingly minor details that, sadly, add up over 50+ runs and result in just the match-3 aspect dominating the game. Rest assured, the game still has a lot that makes it compelling - the storylet-based narrative, in particular, is good at making even fairly tedious runs using nothing but walling-off and harvesting resources for economic boss victories feel like you're still doing something new.

I guess, more than anything, I have a personal belief that match-3 has a lot of undiscovered potential for player expression if one steps far enough from the Bejeweled formula, and that this high-profile release doesn't quite see the way through is a bit of a downer on that front.

So will I also be doing a narrative review????

Believe it or not, I do have almost as much to say about the narrative, but for now, I can't make any promises. All in all, I think I'll allow the wider player base to get in touch with the game before I decide whether or not to give it a crack. In that respect… I guess I'll see you again on social media where you'll be posting funny lines of dialogue out of context.