There are so many ways to dispatch foes in video games, with varying levels of satisfaction. Most of us have been slicing, shooting and squashing foes for longer than we can even remember, and grin over the bodies of those who were once standing in our way. Sometimes though it feels nice to avoid getting your hands dirty, and allowing someone else to take the heat while you sit and watch from a comfy chair. Packed Lair casts you as an evil lord protecting a base, and you can do this without lifting a finger.
There’s not really a story to wax lyrical about in Packed Lair, instead just a general concept. You’re a real bad guy, and your titular lair is getting overrun by pesky heroes. To deal with them you’ll need an army of fantasy goons, which you’ll house in the base because I guess that’s convenient. After a few tutorial messages you’ll never really need to talk to characters again, and can get to the fighting.
When combat starts, you’ll see two armies rushing to attack each other. Your army is on the left and the heroes are on the right, and to keep track of the numbers there’s a health bar and unit count at the bottom of the screen. There’s no rushing in to help your mates here though, you’ll just have to kick back and watch, occasionally throwing a bolt of lightning to deal with a single foe out of hundreds when you get bored. As you add more complex units it’s more fun to watch the chaos unfold (at normal pace or in fast forward mode) but you’ll need to do some renovating for this.
Between fights you’re tasked with filling your cave with different structures, which improve your army. Bases house different unit types, ranging from powerful shielded trolls to spear throwing goblins and everything in between. There are also buildings that provide buffs, like houses that increase the unit count of adjacent bases or windmills that grant extra health to anything they blow on. With a limited grid to fill with structures you’ll have to carefully plan where to put new purchases, which is a puzzle unto itself.
Every defeated wave of enemies grants you gold, and you can spend this at the shop which stocks three new buildings each visit (and can be rerolled if you’re willing to part with a few coins). If you need more space in your lair though you’ll have to dig up more squares, which you can do for a price. Figuring out the best way to spend your cash is the key to winning a run, so look after the pennies.
There’s a selection of different ways to build a successful army in Packed Lair, and I had fun experimenting with them. My first attempt at world domination focused on buffing stronger units to make them unkillable, whereas on my second I did the opposite and bought masses of kamikaze units who wiped out do-gooders in the blink of an eye. Another run I had was more magic focused, as I gathered a host of spells to cast on enemies manually to disrupt their offence. The Roguelike nature of the game means you can never guarantee the best options on each run, so don’t get too disheartened when it all goes wrong.
There are a few different things to unlock between failed or successful runs of Packed Lair, which generally give you more options going forward. With the gems you earn for a job well done you can unlock new buildings with different powers, and some of these even grant you new starting lairs. It rarely feels like a massive shake up when you unlock a single structure you might find on a future run, but they add up in the end.
I had some fun with Packed Lair, but it has some issues that mean I likely won’t spend too much more time with it. The biggest of these is that runs never really feel that different, with so many of the same structures and enemy types repeating over and over again. Whereas most other Roguelikes feature totally different loadouts to try when you want to freshen things up, here the only difference between starting options are the first three buildings you begin with. Otherwise it’s just business as usual, which gets old fast. The lack of interaction means it’s hard to play for huge sessions too, because a bit of spell clicking just doesn’t quite cut it.
Packed Lair is a novel concept for a Roguelike, and the base building especially is both clever and puzzling. It’s the lack of variety that really lets it down though, because seeing those same structures over and over again starts to feel like Groundhog Day. Regardless, as long as you’re okay with this repetition there aren’t a whole lot of Roguelikes like it, and somebody has to defend that lair.
