Alchemic Jousts from Lunatic Pixels is a fun and colorful strategy/tower defense game on PlayStation 4. You get to control the elements and can combine them to reveal new units, skills, and boosts to help you win each battle. Want to learn more about this one? Then read our Alchemic Jousts review!

 

Due to the game’s genre, the control setup favors fast action. You can use the D-pad and the Square and Triangle buttons for Quick Skills selection during battle, while the left analog stick is for selecting specific skills at a slower pace while you select your targets. The X button is for selecting a skill or a target for it, while the Circle button is for canceling. The right analog stick is used for selecting a friendly target (by pressing up or down) or an enemy target (by pressing left or right).

The game kicks off with a tutorial that teaches you the basics. Water beats fire, fire beats rock and rock beats water. On top of this, you can use air as well which can only be defeated by another air unit. You must defend your tower while you attack your enemy’s tower, as you try to counter the enemies it sends your way. Your units and skills regenerate over time so you must always plan one step ahead so that you’re not caught off guard.

After completing a stage, you will be rewarded with Reagents that you can spend at the lab to unlock new things. Combining skills will allow you unlock new skills out of the available tiers, and the higher you go, the more powerful things will be. For example, I combined water and air and this unlocked a cloud which increased air generation by 4 per second. I then got to combine stone and fire, and I ended up with lava – a highly powerful elemental with a considerable cost and a long cooldown. There are 182 skills in total for you to discover, so there’s certainly plenty of replay value in the game! If you screw up a combination, all is not lost. For every five combinations you mess up (or when you level up) you’ll gain a clue you can use to obtain information on a skill you can discover.

Something to consider during battle is that using a skill will make it so that all the skills that share the same cooldown group cannot be used, so don’t you forget it! As you battle, you’ll aim at getting control of the area in the center of the stage. Doing so will allow you to trigger certain skills at that point, giving you an advantage over your opponent. Completing a battle will also reward you with some experience so you can level up.

Once you complete the tutorial, you’ll be able to select from three difficulty levels per battle so that you can try to beat your enemies during more challenging fights. The higher the difficulty setting, the more experience and Reagents you’ll get, so it’s definitely worth a shot every now and then so that you can test your might and to be able to level up faster and gain more Reagents to unlock more combinations. If you only battle on Easy, you won’t be able to get more than one star for your efforts. Battles won on Normal grant you two stars, while completing them in Hard will net you three stars.

There’s also other types of battles to take on, such as the one under the capture format. For this type of battle, you must use your units to grab the wands that will appear in the air or on the ground, and take them back to your tower. Every wand you bring back damages your enemy’s tower, and the first one to end up with no hit points will lose the match. Once one of your elementals has grabbed a wand, it won’t be able to attack – a single hit is all it will take for another elemental to steal your wand, so you should plan accordingly to see when you should go on the offensive and when you should look for a chance to steal a wand or two.

Selecting the right combination of skills for each battle is very important, so be sure to mix and match things so that you can make the most of the resources you generate. You should review how some skills benefit others so that you can always have the upper hand during battle. And don’t forget to always bring several of the smaller and cheaper units so that you can always have a unit type ready to take care of business!

I had a lot of fun with Alchemic Jousts, and I definitely recommend it to those of you looking for a fast-paced and entertaining strategy/defense release on PS4. There’s a ton of units, boosts and skills to unlock, plenty of battle types to engage in and a ton of trophies to obtain, so you’ll definitely spend dozens of hours playing this one.

Disclaimer
This Alchemic Jousts review is based on a PS4 copy provided by Lunatic Pixels.