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TOWER-DEFENSE
Luckitown Review: Sokpop Made Me Care About Dice Again (I'm As Shocked As You Are)
I've played enough tower defense games to know they're all the same recycled garbage with different skins. Then Sokpop threw dice at the genre and somehow made me think about farm placement for twenty minutes straight.
Paul
December 27, 2025
7.2
Overall Score
"I'm as shocked as you are that Luckitown is actually good."
First Impressions (Or: When I Stopped Rolling My Eyes at the Dice Pun)
Look, I'm exhausted. Tower defense games have been creatively bankrupt since Plants vs. Zombies, and adding dice to the mix sounded like the kind of gimmick some developer pitches after three beers. But this is Sokpop, the Dutch collective that somehow pumps out two games a month, and occasionally one doesn't make me want to quit gaming forever. So I launched Luckitown expecting to write another scathing review about wasted potential. Then I spent thirty minutes optimizing my workshop placement and realized I'd been had. The dice aren't just window dressing â they're the entire economy, the strategic layer, the reason I'm still thinking about beacon ranges when I should be sleeping. You roll dice each turn to generate resources, and those resources build structures that give you better dice that generate different resources. It's a feedback loop that actually feels smart instead of manipulative, which is so rare I had to check if I was playing the right game.
The Dice Mechanics: Finally, RNG That Doesn't Feel Like a Personal Attack
Here's the thing about dice in games: they're usually an excuse for lazy design. Can't balance your game? Add randomness and call it strategy. But Luckitown's dice system is genuinely clever because you can HOLD dice between turns, preventing them from rerolling. This one mechanic transforms what could be pure luck into actual planning. I can save up specific resources, build toward a strategy, and feel like my decisions matter even when the RNG gods hate me. You start with basic resource dice, but building farms gives you food dice, workshops produce tool dice, and markets generate coin dice. Each building type unlocks new strategic possibilities, and suddenly I'm thinking three turns ahead about whether to rush menhirs for magic dice or invest in economy first. The workshop placement mini-game alone â where you need to position them to repair nearby structures while still being efficient â gave me more satisfaction than entire AAA strategy games I've suffered through this year.
Tower Defense That Respects My Intelligence (What a Novel Concept)
The tower defense part is turn-based, which immediately makes it better than 95% of the genre because I can actually THINK instead of panic-clicking. Enemies approach your town, you place defensive structures using your dice rolls, and positioning matters in ways that remind me of Into the Breach â another game that understood spatial strategy. Beacons extend the range of nearby buildings, so suddenly you're playing Tetris with your town layout to maximize coverage. Menhirs create powerful magic dice but get slower if you crowd them, forcing you to balance density with efficiency. This is the kind of strategic depth that makes me angry at other tower defense games for being so lazy. I'm making real choices about building placement, resource allocation, and defensive priorities, not just spamming the highest DPS tower I can afford. The difficulty spikes are brutal though â one moment I'm confidently defending against basic enemies, the next I'm watching my carefully planned town crumble because I didn't anticipate the enemy composition. It's frustrating in that old-school way where I blame myself instead of the game, which I grudgingly respect.
Visuals and Audio: Sokpop's Greatest Hits Album (For Better or Worse)
The low-poly aesthetic is peak Sokpop house style, and honestly I'm tired of it. They've used this look in twenty games and I get it, it's charming, it's distinctive, it runs on a potato. But I'm ready for them to evolve past 'colorful PS1 nostalgia' and try something new. That said, the dice animations are satisfying, the building designs are clear and functional, and I never struggled to read the battlefield â which is more than I can say for most pixel art indie games that sacrifice clarity for 'retro authenticity.' The audio is fine. Not memorable, not offensive, just there. The dice rolling sounds are pleasant enough, the UI clicks don't make me want to mute everything, and there's background music I stopped noticing after ten minutes. For a Sokpop game made in a month, this is basically AAA production values, but let's not pretend the bar isn't underground for this collective.
What Almost Works (And What Actually Does)
The economy loop is brilliant when it clicks. Building farms to get food dice to build better farms to get more food dice while also investing in workshops for repairs and markets for coins creates this cascading strategy puzzle that kept me engaged way longer than expected. But the game doesn't explain itself well â I spent my first three runs building randomly before I understood how building synergies actually work. The holding dice mechanic is genius but the tutorial barely mentions it, which meant I played like an idiot for an hour before discovering I could actually plan my turns. When you finally understand the systems, Luckitown becomes this tight strategic experience where every decision matters and bad luck can be mitigated through smart play. That's rare. Most roguelike tower defense games just throw RNG at you and shrug. This one gives you tools to fight back, and that makes all the difference between a game I respect and one I actually want to play.
The Sokpop Tax (Or: Why I Keep Coming Back Despite Myself)
Here's my grudging admission: Sokpop makes games I actually finish, which almost never happens anymore. They're small, focused, and usually have one good idea executed well enough that I don't feel robbed of my time. Luckitown is that formula firing on all cylinders. It's not trying to be a 100-hour epic or the next big esports phenomenon. It's a tight, clever tower defense game with dice mechanics that actually enhance the strategy instead of replacing it. I've played it for probably eight hours across multiple runs, and I'm still finding new strategies. That's more than I gave most $30 Steam releases this year. The randomization keeps runs fresh, the strategic depth rewards learning, and the difficulty is punishing enough that victories feel earned. I'm annoyed that a game made in basically a month by four Dutch people is better than most tower defense games with actual budgets and teams. But here we are.
Rating Breakdown
Quality
7
For a Sokpop joint, this is shockingly polished â barely any jank, UI actually makes sense, and I didn't encounter a single bug that made me want to uninstall.
Innovation
8
Dice-based tower defense that actually works as more than a gimmick? I haven't seen resource management feel this fresh since Kingdom: New Lands, and that was years ago.
Value
8
Sokpop's subscription model is already absurd value, but even standalone this would be worth it â I got hours out of something I expected to bounce off in fifteen minutes.
Gameplay
7
The core loop of rolling, holding, and placement kept me up past midnight despite my better judgment, though the difficulty spikes made me want to throw my keyboard.
Audio/Visual
6
Classic Sokpop low-poly charm that I'm honestly tired of seeing everywhere, but at least the sound design doesn't grate on my nerves like most indie tower defense games.
Replayability
7
Random dice rolls and multiple viable strategies mean I actually want to try again after losing, which is more than I can say for 90% of roguelikes pretending to have replayability.
What Didn't Annoy Me
Dice holding mechanic transforms RNG into actual strategy instead of being an excuse for bad design
Building synergies create genuinely interesting spatial puzzles that remind me why I liked tower defense before it became mindless
Turn-based gameplay lets me think instead of panic, which apparently is too much to ask from most modern games
Multiple viable strategies and random elements create actual replayability, not the fake kind where you just grind the same content
Sokpop's monthly release schedule means this cost basically nothing and still delivers more value than games ten times the price
What Made Me Sigh
Tutorial explains almost nothing about the deeper mechanics, so expect to waste your first few runs learning through failure
Difficulty spikes feel random and punishing until you understand the systems, then they just feel punishing
Low-poly Sokpop aesthetic is getting old â I've seen this visual style in twenty of their games and I'm ready for evolution
No real endgame or meta-progression, so once you beat it a few times the appeal fades faster than I'd like
Final Verdict
I'm as shocked as you are that Luckitown is actually good. Sokpop took two overdone concepts â tower defense and dice mechanics â and made something that feels fresh in 2024, which shouldn't be possible but here we are. The dice holding system is brilliant, the building synergies create real strategic depth, and the turn-based structure respects my time and intelligence. Yes, the tutorial is terrible and the difficulty spikes made me curse in Dutch, but those are minor complaints when the core loop is this solid. It's not going to change your life or win any awards, but it's a genuinely clever strategy game that I actually wanted to keep playing. For a Sokpop release, that's high praise. For an indie tower defense game in 2024, it's basically a miracle.
Luckitown
Tags
tower-defense
dice
strategy
roguelike
turn-based
sokpop
resource-management
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