Castle Champions brings Tiny Tower to the medieval ages on iOS

Earlier this month, we took at look at Gamenauts newest iOS games Castle Champions, which mixes the tower-building gameplay of Tiny Tower with a medieval setting and battle system. Now that the game has launched for free on iPhone and iPad, we've found this to be one experience that's unfortunately hurt by a fundamental design flaw.

If you're familiar with Tiny Tower or any other similar tower-builders, you'll likely feel right at home in Castle Champions. Each floor of your tower can hold two buildings, from entertainment venues and shops to residences for workers and training facilities for your soldiers. Additional rooms and floors can be added by earning coins, with coins coming from a variety of sources, one of which being the selling of goods in these stores.

Coins can also be earned by completing quests that appear seemingly at random as you progress through the game. Every few minutes, a medieval battle will become available for completion, as your warriors (again, those that you've trained in your tower's appropriate buildings or through quests) battle the enemy team automatically until one side is defeated. As for the quests, these see you assigning available workers to complete them over varying lengths of time.

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Since so many actions in Castle Champions come with completion timers, you'd likely expect these timers to run down just as the real world clock continues moving forward. That's true, if the app is left open in your iOS device's multitasking bar, but if you ever close the app, it crashes, or you even turn off or reset your phone, all of the timers stop and your progress comes to a complete halt until you reopen the app and get things going again. Unfortunately, we ran into quite a few app crashes during our time with Castle Champions, which forced us to constantly relaunch the app just to get things moving again.

At its core, the Tiny Tower mechanics of Castle Champions and the medieval battles work well, and the game could really be a hit if the timer issue and game crashes were worked out. This is one to keep an eye on in the future, but don't go in expecting perfection just yet.

Download Castle Champions on iTunes >

Have you tried Castle Champions? Did you run into similar issues with the game's timers? Sound off in the comments!