It's a little too easy to get obsessed with the auto-battler Oaken Tower

Oaken Tower has you build up a tower of items to create powerful synergies, to fight against other players in asynchronous PvP battles. It very much reminds me of the also quite popular Backpack Battles, except you're building a small tower instead of doing some backpack Tetris.

Entering Early Access on April 28th, it's quickly gained a lot of players and a Very Positive user rating due to how easy it is to get into. It makes for a rather good coffee-break game, to try out some different builds and see what happens. Since the multiplayer is asynchronous, it doesn't matter if anyone is even online since it grabs builds from other players continually as you play. It's a perfect way to do PvP battles for a game like this (other similar games do the same).

How it works - each turn you go into the shop to buy up weapons and extras to stick into specific slots on your tower. Combining the same items levels them up to make them more powerful and lots of the items have different special status effects like mult-cast, bleeding, poison and so on - that all work together to make some powerful combinations. Some items give others in specific positions special boosts too.

Then, when you're ready with your build, you dive into your next match to see how your chosen items will stack up against other players. As an autobattler, you don't directly do anything for the battles, you just watch the chaos happen and study everything closely to see where you need to improve your build.

As you progress through it, you also get to pick special perks to boost your build like increasing your HP, boosting a specific item with new stats and lots more. There's many ways to change each run through.

I just love seeing all the effects going off when the screen starts filling up, it's satisfying to see, especially as you watch the enemy health bar get smashed to pieces. Although, it's usually my health bar getting annihilated. It does take a while to learn what works and what doesn't.

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Game Highlights:

• Asynchronous roguelike PvP
• Over 120+ unique items with class specific types
• Gameplay progression through unlockable perks and cosmetic items
• 20+ game-changing NPC encounters
• Deeply synergistic item system with exponential combo potential
• Casual and Ranked gameplay modes with leaderboards and seasons
• Endless Mode

It scratches a very particular itch, and is a great implementation of an autobattler. It's still in Early Access though so they're working on balancing and adding new content over the next year or so. Worth the £8.50 price though easily.

Oaken Tower works perfectly on Linux with Proton 11.