Becastled

Written by Jason Dailey on 11/1/2025 for PS5  

Any city builder worth its salt is one that is tough to put down each time you play it. The same goes for real-time strategy and tower defense games. Whether it’s one more building, one more round of combat, or one more wave of defense, if it makes you play longer than you intended to, that’s how you know it’s a good one. That’s precisely how I feel about Becastled, a triumvirate of city building, real-time strategy, and tower defense that has a few bugs and oddities, but is still compelling regardless of your prior exposure to these genres.

My first observation about Becastled is how accessible it is thanks to an extensive (and very good) string of tutorials that succinctly introduces you to all its core tenants. For a game that blends three genres together, it is remarkably easy to pick up and get going. It is a simple game that builds depth by layering its disparate parts together in an easily digestible manner.

You begin by placing your castle on the map, quickly followed by a sawmill to produce wood, which serves as the primary building block for nearly your entire city. The map is tile-based, with each tile containing different resources. Some may have trees where you can acquire more wood with a sawmill, or deer that will provide food if you place a hunter’s hut. Tiles are unlocked in exchange for resources, creating a give-and-take where you need more resources to expand your city, but you also need to expand to gain access to more resources. Growth begets growth in Becastled. In addition to constructing buildings, you also need to keep your citizenry fed, army strong, and sunstone (money) flowing. I found myself absorbed in this addictive gameplay loop of expanding my city, borders, and army which was so satisfying to watch.

Each building requires certain resources to build, but they can also be a long-term drain as well. For instance, your melee combat unit and archery buildings produce soldiers for your army, but each unit will cost you food and a bit of sunstone to maintain. You also must consider how the noise of the rock quarry affects the mood of nearby housing when deciding where to place structures, as an example. This give-and-take of resources and growth feels properly balanced to keep pushing you forward. And it’s why I sometimes looked at the clock and couldn’t believe how much time—both real and in-game—had passed.

The overarching gameplay loop is more than just gathering resources and building stuff, though. A day and night cycle means you will spend the daylight hours constructing and soldiering-up in preparation to defend your castle from moon beasts that attack at night. Enemy spawn points are shown on the map, so you understand the assignment of where to focus your defensive efforts prior to nightfall. With each passing day, the moon beasts grow in strength and numbers, and every fifth day is a blood moon, which increases the challenge even further for that day. The goal is to destroy all the moon beasts’ lunar towers—which spawn a boss wave—and survive a final onslaught (and I do mean onslaught) of enemy hordes without letting your castle be destroyed.

I grew overconfident in my humble city’s defensive capabilities at one point. My army was approaching 100 strong, and I had nearly closed in my boundaries with wood walls, trebuchets, and ballista. “I can take on the final wave, let’s obliterate that last lunar tower!” I told myself. That was a critical error. I had to summon my citizen militia as a last-ditch defensive effort, but the moon beasts still wiped me and my city off the map like a tsunami hitting a coastal town. I played on difficulty four of eight, which is the default, but trust me when I tell you that the last wave is no joke. I don’t think it was an unfair spike in difficulty per se. I think, again, that I simply overestimated my military readiness. I did also leave several upgrades on the table in the technology upgrade tree that likely would have made an impact, such as stone walls and towers. And in typing that sentence, I now see how idiotic it sounds that I took on the final wave of a tower defense game without the top-tier defensive upgrades.

To help you expand your city of sun people, the technology tree allows you to use gathered resources to unlock new buildings, weapons, and upgrades. Unlock the warehouse to store more wood and stone, barracks to increase the size of your army, or gain the ability to tax citizens to fill your sunstone coffers. As I’ve highlighted from my own personal failings, these upgrades are critical to both your success and your survival.

Even with an extensive skill tree and eventually sprawling city to manage, I was surprised at how easy it was to stay on top of everything in Becastled. It has the perfect amount of depth to its systems to satisfy longtime fans of this sort of game, but not too much to overwhelm newbies. Radial menus streamline the experience, and only the information you need within each menu is presented to you. There are no overabundant tool tip pop-ups or myriad submenus to wrestle with here.

Becastled is light-hearted in a sense, accentuated by its colorful and somewhat low-poly art style. It lays on the charm and feels rather “low stakes” compared to some other city builders. I also appreciated design flourishes like dynamic weather and seasons, which change every three in-game days and have subtle effects on gameplay. Lightning strikes can destroy buildings, felled trees don’t re-appear until the next season, and wheat farms go dormant in the winter requiring you to fire up a coal kiln to keep folks warm.

Along those lines, there are some great quality-of-life features too. Like the ability to enter upgrade mode, which lets you quickly upgrade buildings with a single-click as you pan around the city. Or how you can quickly select all of a certain type of soldier unit via radial menu.

With that said, I have yet to discover an easy way to upgrade army units, with the only option appearing to be selecting each individual soldier and upgrading them in their menu screen. It’s annoying, inconvenient, and totally out of character with how streamlined the rest of Becastled is.

I ran into a few other issues as well. Navigating the tech tree is unintuitive on a controller, and downright dreadful, to be honest. Game performance can chug during intense battles, and, on one occasion, my army slowly died one-by-one during the daytime after surviving the prior night’s battle phase. I also hated that I couldn’t pan the camera down closer to the horizontal axis, which is typically standard for the genre.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Becastled quite a bit. Even with some minor annoyances, I often found myself playing longer than I planned to. Its gameplay loop is easy to get sucked in to, and its systems are nicely balanced in a way that is never too much or not enough when it comes to genre standards. If you’ve always been curious about city builders, tower defense, or real-time strategy games, Becastled is a fine place to start. If you already love these sorts of games, then you can’t go wrong picking this one up.