Wanderburg - Es gibt nur eine Burg!

Hello there, good people!

It's Amalia here, and we'd like to talk about a cool little indie game we found!

So, let's dig into....

-Wanderburg-

So, Wanderburg is, for once on this blog, a very recent release!

It released into early access in September of '26, and is made by Randwerk, a small, and relatively new German indie Studio, with Wanderburg being their second release.

It's also published by Sidekick Publishing which, as it turns out, publishes a lot of cool little indie games. Good to know!😉

So, what -is- Wanderburg?

Well...

It's an isometric action-roguelike where you drive a castle on wheels(or legs!), leveling up, upgrading stuff and doing your best to survive each level.

So, let's talk about it, shall we? Starting with...

-Graphics and sound-

So, to start with, the game has a very cartoony presentation in general. The whole premise is silly, and they had fun with it.

The art style is bright, colourful and cel-shaded, the music is bouncy, cheerful and incredibly catchy.

There's tons of flashy, shiny graphics effects happening all the time, and there's also a near-constant barrage of satisfying little sound effects as you collect coins, fire abilities, gain upgrades and so on.

When you get upgrades, the little fanfares that play even sound more or less enthusiastic depending on how lucky you got with the draw.

Actually, the game's sort of a perfect example of what we keep saying: This isn't exactly a game that'll tax your GTX5090 with raw graphical fidelity, but the combination of great art style, excellent sound design and catchy soundtrack make for an absolute feast for your eyes and ears, even though it'll probably run on a potato.

So yeah, clearly, we like the presentation. Now, let's get into...

-Game structure-

Well, let's start from the top: There's an overworld where you select the level you'd like to play.

It's quite simple right now, and basically just functions as a biome/difficulty selector, with higher difficulties for each biome only unlocking after you beat an entire run (all 3 bosses) on the previous difficulty level.

The biomes, by the way, are temperate european forest, an Arid/Desert biome and marshy, gloomy swamplands.

Once you pick a level, you get to the loadout screen, where you can pick your starting.... well, loadout.

The parts you can select here include:

-The basic vehicle you're using, which determines how many weapon slots you get.

-Your captain, who massively changes gameplay, introducing huge bonuses to certain stats or even introducing entirely new gameplay elements.

-Your crew, who provide either some autorepair, passive coin income or some different flavours of extra firepower.

-Your starter module, which is basically your starting weapon.

And an initial artifact, which are essentially mutators, introducing special effects into gameplay or simply boosting stats.

Once you're satisfied, off you go into the level!

So, you drive around using your left stick (Or WASD, if you're that way inclined) with the goal of growing stronger before the next boss shows up, for which there's a timer just below your health and boost bars. Also, yes, you castle has nitro, because why wouldn't it?😉

We'll get into the upgrade system in it's own section later on, but suffice it to say, it's fast-paced and fun.

Your various weapon modules have two types of attack each. An automatic attack, which constantly triggers based on a cooldown, as well as an active ability you can trigger. (Say a big barrage of your cannons, a dash ability with the ram or spawning additional soldiers from your mobile barracks)

And of course, you fight enemies. Many, many enemies, all of which falling somewhere in the theme of "Castles, but mobile"

There's cannon castles, archer castles, ramming castles, small castles, big castles, stationary castles, castles on legs, castles on wheels, you name it, they've put it in here. There's also quite a few flavours of soldiers, from archers, to mages to cannon-wielding unicyclists. You can drive straight at those and nom them up through your front gate. Or just shoot stuff at them.

Anyway, you keep fighting, growing stronger as you go. On occasion, the game will spawn a "swarm", which is simply a wave of enemies (often a lot of infantry) to deal with. And then, 3 times per run when the timer runs out, a boss spawns.

These get pretty big and bad, but so do you. Because after defeating each boss, you're presented with the option of either a mobility-focused upgrade, or a more defensive tank sort of upgrade. And then, you actually grow bigger.

This isn't just cosmetic, either. Your hitbox grows larger, the camera zooms out, and you even gain the ability to gobble up bigger enemies through your front gate!

Importantly, these big boss upgrades also fully refill your health bar (along with growing it bigger), making it one of the 2 main ways to heal. There's also finite health boxes scattered throughout the levels, and a couple of upgrades allowing you to heal by hoovering enemies up through the front gate.

But yes, that's the gameplay loop. Grow stronger, beat next boss, grow stronger. After beating the third boss of the level, you win the run, and are presented with the option to play overtime, earning extra silver, which is the game's meta-currency to unlock upgrades in the overworld.

Before we get into that though, let's talk about how the mid-run upgrade system actually works!

-Upgrade System-

So, during your runs, you get stronger in 2 ways:

You collect coins (Or hoover up sheep, peasants, infantry etc, which are -worth- coins) until you level up, at which point you get a random draw of 3 module upgrades.

They're colour-coded, going from bronze to silver, gold and a red(ruby?) epic tier, upgrading things like cooldowns, projectile amount of the autoattack or special ability stats.

With every few level ups, you also get to pick a new weapon, until all the slots on your vehicle are filled. With the standard "Wanderturm" vehicle, that'd be when you have a module in the front, back, side and top slots.

As you choose upgrades for the modules, they also individually level up, and every 5th level, you get to pick between two special upgrades that can change the module's function quite a bit.

And then, there's the second way you get more powerful: Artifacts.

These, you get from treasure chests, which can be gained by defeating various structures or enemies scattered through the run.

Once you defeat such an enemy, it drops the chest, allowing you to pick it up. Much like weapon upgrades, you're presented with a random draw of 3 options:

Some of these will be minor stat boosts or health increases, others can quite significantly impact gameplay. There's even a couple that can save you from death, potentially salvaging your entire run.

This all might sound somewhat complicated (and we haven't even mentioned re-rolls!), but just keep in mind that this game is fast-paced, and the upgrade system was designed with that in mind. It boils down to a very brief pause every now and then while you quickly pick between 2-3 options. There aren't really any -massively- wrong choices, so you won't feel the need to sit there and contemplate the choice for ages. Though you could, if you wanted to.😉

So, with all that said, why don't i hand over to my Michael for a bit, so he can tell you about the progression -outside- of the runs, and our overall thoughts on this little game.

I'll see you around!✋

-Meta Progression-

Why hello there, good people! So, meta progression.

Unfortunately, Amalia's not left me with that much to talk about, here. You see, the game has a meta progression system in that you unlock new stuff, but it's 100% sidegrades. There's nothing like straight stat boosts that carry over between runs or anything, so actually, this game is a "true" roguelike.

But we'll talk about the unlocks, of course.

So, as Amalia's pointed out, there's "silver" in the game, which is used to unlock more stuff. There's a few ways of earning silver:

For one, you simply get it at the end of every run. 10% of the total gold you collect to level up will be counted up as silver, you get silver with each boss you beat and there's the overtime mechanic, where you survive as long as possible while enemy spawns keep escalating, inevitably overwhelming you, eventually.

There's also a silver multiplier that's dependent on level difficulty. Harder levels give more silver, of course.

But actually, a much more powerful source of silver is available: Quests!

There's daily quests, level-specific quests, and a few overall special quests that are used to unlock a few special modules. Most of them are a case of "Destroy X number of this enemy". Very much stuff you're just gonna do as part of the normal gameplay.

The silver from these quests isn't multiplied by the level difficulty multiplier, but they're still likely gonna be your biggest source of silver, simply because they give you an absolute ton of it. Many of these quests are one-and-done per level though, so it's not an infinite spring.

But what do you actually -do- with that silver? Well, you unlock more stuff. Different captains and starting artifacts, which gives you potential for wildly different gameplay modifiers. Different modules, which gives you more variety in your runs, as these new modules can then also be gained mid-run.

Different crew options to start with, all that stuff. Even the Spiderburg and Tankenburg vehicles.

But yeah, with that said, while you'll definitely find that you've got preferences with the weapon modules and such, we haven't really found anything that's just supremely better than anything else. I'm sure that some hypermaxxing-ultragamers would disagree and point out that module XY is 0.387% more efficient, and therefore the only module you should ever unlock or use, but then.... meh.😛

Point is, the meta-progression is less of a progression system and more of a broadening of the available content. It's perfectly fun to unlock more stuff, but don't expect to ever gain a proper advantage in your future runs. The game is essentially static when it comes to that.

(At least for now. It -is- an early access game, after all.)

So then, let's get to our...

-Conclusion-

So, a bit of an unusual post for us, for one because it's a modern indie game, which we actually play a fair few of, but rarely write about, but also because it's a non-story game, so we dug a little deeper into the mechanical nitty-gritty than we usually do.

But yeah, Wanderburg happened to catch our eye on Steam when it came out, and we're glad we gave it a shot. It doesn't cost much, but it's a pretty good, well-presented and fast paced experience. I'd say it could do with more content and perhaps something to spice up the gameplay loop a bit more, but simply put, Wanderburg succeeds really nicely as a "just sit down and have fun"-kind of experience.

Arguably, it kinda looks and plays like one of those fake mobile game ads on Youtube. You know, the ones that blatantly just don't care about false advertising laws? Kinda looks like one of those. But y'know, it's real, and actually a good, fun game to play. And it won't try and milk you with microtransactions while running a bitcoin miner or something.

...... man, we're the best at praising games we like.😜

So yeah, anyways. Wanderburg is pretty cool. We think you'll already find it worth the (modest) price, if you choose to go for it. Otherwise, you might just wanna keep it on your radar for a few months and wait for more stuff to be added.

But until then, stay safe, keep rollin' and have a good one!😉