The Castle Doctrine

The only time to have played this game was back in 2014 and even then I can't say my experience with it was great.

The basic premise is kinda interesting as you get to make a house and set up traps. Some of these traps require tools the player brings to disarm them. You get money to buy more tools and to make a more elaborate house by robbing other houses. I would normally start going in depth to describe all the various systems like breakable walls, dogs, electric floors, security doors, etc...; but nothing you can set up compares to just making a door that only opens with a combination lock.

Since you can set up doors that stay closed unless you press a certain sequence of one time only switches, the invader needs to guess right the first time. This is the kind of thing you would expect out of a shitty troll Mario Maker Stage but now you have a game where this 'level design' is encouraged. None of the other mechanics matter at this point either. Even back when I played any house that could afford to set this up would do this and the rest were poor newer players that you didn't get much of a reward or challenge robbing.

Apparently the devs of the game got involved in some NFT nonsense as well so put that on the list of why not to get this game.


I swear I had more than 30 minutes in this game but hey maybe I can even try and get a refund on it now.

A cool idea in principle. Everyone builds a dungeon of traps and paths with a treasure hidden inside, and then tries to rob everyone else... except it's all dark and edgy. The reality is that people either half ass it or master building optimised unfun vaults. Personally I just wasn't down with the vibe it was putting out.

Never struck me as fun at the time and has only gone on to become controversial.

Don't listen to these reviews, enough people are playing it that it's extremely fun and has such amazing replay-ability. Absolutely recommend plz buy

unique but I only play it in short bursts because it is annoying rebuilding everything everytime I die in someone else's house, I wish you could at least save house plans. It is fun watching people try to rob your house.

I think it is fair to say this game needs a good community to play; fortunately, I'm a nerd and Jason gives away the server code when you buy. This also helps prevent angst against cheating, and tbh at this point I just want to play with my handful of friends. Amazing work on a simple concept, devilishly intricate, and more fun than actually robbing your friends.

This needs a remake that is less hard core and more fun.
The gameplay idea in this is great but the barrier to entry (barrier to fun) is huge.
The houses still up are too intricate for new players to afford and there aren't enough new players to build up a budget.

I want a private server for this game to play it with 10-20 friends but as it exists it just isn't a game any more.

In short: A multiplayer only game with no players. Don't buy.

One of the most dissappointing games I've ever played. The premise isn't even that bad: set up traps in your house, foil the traps of others. However, the way the system was implimented leads to nothing but tedium and frustration. High level players had mountains of cash to build over-elaborate deathtraps, exploiting every quirk of the game mechanics to make houses that required knowledge of what objects were placed OUTSIDE the walls of the house to complete, as things like dogs would run around in the yard, totally unseeable, pressing switches and unleashing hell unless you knew exactly how to dance around to get them where you need them. And this does not even include the "fun" designs players could begin making when their family had been killed, allowing even more freedom in how they set up their dungeon.

The effect was that new players quickly became frustrated and left, which dried up the pool of houses that you could actually be reasonably assured to complete, meaning that the game had literally no point unless your intent was to just feed the players sitting in their palacial death-mansions. This was not helped by the absurd price of the game, and the devs bizzarely principled stand on only having one sale ever. They clearly value their game to a very high degree, but that pride seems to have ultimately hurt the game.

The game now has an average player count per day of around 0.5, and the peak players in the last 30 days was 2. This is a multiplayer only game that has half of a human being playing daily and never more than a couple at one time. It no longer functions as a game.

Honestly, I adored this game. I loved it in every way, played it often and thought the creator was brilliant for such a simple yet complex idea. But please make this game free already so the community can grow and thrive, then (if you absolutely have to), when it's at its peak you can pull the plug and demand your (at this point) ridiculous $17.99 (for a 100% dead game). Everybody reads reviews and nobody will buy this in its current state. If money is what you're truly after then make it free temporarily and then you'll eventually get your way because everybody will want to buy / play it when there's thousands of houses to burgle.

Game was pretty unbalanced but still fun when it was releassed, but now, there are only a small number of players to interact with. I would not reccomend this at all.

This game needs to be revived if its worth every penny that it costs on the account that too many people have stopped and those who continue are over powered and make the game unfair for the few selection of people that think this might be a good game, Back then i would have recomended this game on the account of a wide selection of people who played it which made this game lush and fair between experienced and non experienced people, likewise it is dead now.

I'm not sure how many of you will see this, but here it goes... I imagine you're asking yourself "do I want this game?" and having second thoughts after reading a handful of negative reviews about how "dead" the community is.

This, DOESN'T MATTER. there are active players and they will be enough, trust me. In the brevity of time I spent on the game it consumed me. It was the only thing on my mind until I accidently killed myself and walked away.

I was always checking if someone had attacked me, had they succeded, improving my defenses, repairing damage done. It is incredibly addicting, you have been warned.

Within two weeks I had spent 77 hours on this game, it may have been just one week... I can't really remmeber. I would have Castle Doctrine open on the side while I played other games, checking every time I finished a game of League of Legends or Hearthstone. Had I been attacked? What happened?

The message I'm trying to tell you is that while there might not be too many people running around, they are there, and you should be afraid. Just because you're not online doesn't mean you can't be attacked. As well as the fact that this game can be insanely addicting, (it was for me).

... Oh god writing this review... I've been drawn back in.

*Edit* The game is always hardcore, you die, you start over from scratch. The game isn't afraid to drop you on your head and let your brain spill out. You died verifying your own defenses? Start from scratch, died trying to rob someone? Start from scratch, somebody killed your family, stole all your possesions, and now you have no reason to live? Suicide and enjoy starting off with a new family. a new safe, an empty house, and 2k (scratch, square one, however you want to say it).

Do NOT buy this game! At this point, anyone that buys this game is being robbed. The game revolves around being able to steal items and money from other people to build up your own defences. Sounds good right? It would be, but the few people that are still in the game are near impossible to rob with the crap items you are able to buy straight off. You are able to rob less than 20 people at the moment. These remaining people range from being so easy that there is no reward, or a complex structure that will kill you if you make a single mistake, there is NO in between.

Back in this games golden days, this could've been an entertaining game. It had an interesting concept with only one problem, it RELIES on people playing the actual game! there are no NPC's that you can rob for a small ammount of cash, and there's nothing to get you off of the bottom of the food chain.

You lose the game the second you click the buy button.

If this game was about $1 I would say go for it maybe at that price the community would come back to life. But sadly this game is $16 and the Developers have long ago abandoned it along with it's entire community. The Idea of this game was really great and I enjoyed it greatly but it had a very big flaw in the game where it was extremely hard to get more money except for waiting for new players to join and not know how to play and steal their stater 2k. If you some how got lucky and had tons and tons of money you would end up making this crazy impenetrable fortress of timers and traps that no one could ever break into. The Poor would stay poor and the Rich would get richer. I greatly enjoyed the satisfaction of making a maze full of traps and watching people try my maze along with finally breaking through a house but it was very rare it was either rich people or broke people and the Developers did nothing about it and let the game die and kept the price for the very low developed game very High. This game is impossible to play with out other players and it's dead don't buy it unless it's $1 for that faint chance they try to save this game.

I played this game a year ago and it is completely not worth playing any more. The community is dead and only rich players who ruin your new house when it gains any value remain. I have not been able to let my house sit while I sleep without being reduced to 0 worth as of late.

Since I don't have the luxury of time to camp my house hour after hour, the game is broken for me. It was fun while it lasted. I hope this type of game gets a reboot with more content.

The Castle Doctrine had a very nice thought, yet was terribly executed.

For one, the game is hyper-realistic. when trying to get to your vault by testing your traps, you can actually die by your traps. And I mean literally die, so you have to start all over again. even the smallest change to your house will make you test it again. Another thing is that you can give your wife a shotgun as a defense, and she will kill you.

Next, there is interface. While playing, I felt very, very enclosed. no real menus, you only get to see one kind of screen, and most of the time it's just black darkness. It alwas uses re-ocurring colors like grey, orange, dark cyan and black. it seems very bland and boring to just look at.

Graphics aside, we are onto gameplay. My gosh, is it hard to even take a step. you start off in house with your wife and kids and $2000. You can either use the money to build your house, or you can use it to get robbing equipment. Oh, and by the way, the main premice of the game is to rob people or steal robbers' bounty. You can go to the list of countless people and rob their houses, but you know you can't. Somehow, someway, everyone on that list has figured out the perfect way to protect thier house and get tons of ca$h. So how do you win? You can't. You'll try , but after about 5 minutes you realise that no mattter what you try to do, it's impossible to get more than your base $2000.

To sum it up, The Castle Doctrine is not worth half it's price. It's badly made, which will make you expect much more. But no, I pretty much told everything in this review. I thing the price for $16 dollars asking for waaaayy to much, so it should be down to $5. Anyways, the promotional sale was literally the only discount ever on this game.It's literally in the announcement. So if you have $16 to burn, do NOT use it here. Please use it somewhere else. Thank you.

Don't bother. There is plenty of cheating. Some people even bought the game for two accounts so they could ghost and get insider information into peoples layout. Since it's release, the playerbase has fallen apart. I was so excited for this. This game was brought to its knees by the dev's personal politics and his failure to close some basic gaps.

EDIT: Player base is totally gone. No one is left. Jason, I told you so.

EDIT: This review is obsolete. It describes what the game was like when the community was vivid and bustling (it was a very fun game back then). Nowadays almost no one plays this game and the few houses that remain are very much unbreakable.

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In order to enjoy this game you need to accept it's rules:

*There's not going to be any hand-holding, you're supposed to learn how to play the game by trial-and-failure. Some of the best experiences from this game come from experimenting by your own initiative and gradually learning better methods to build and destroy trap systems. Tutorials would only ruin all the fun of learning by dying or getting robbed.

*This is not a puzzle game. Don't come in with any illusions that you are going to be able to simply figure out the solutions to other players houses by using your smarts. Efficient homes are designed in such a way that their solution cannot be seen and if you try to take a guess the odds will be staggeringly against you. In order to defeat a home what you really need is to make the best use of your available tools in order to disable the houseowner's traps.

*There is a big gap between the experienced players and the newcomers, but it's a fair one. There is no 'leveling up' or gaining 'experience' for killing enemies here, the only thing that separates the veterans from the noobs is the very things that The Castle Doctrine is all about; tactics and deception. The players who are up in the top are there solely because they know how to manage their risks and have figured out techniques to build houses that are very hard to penetrate. You won't stand a chance against the home of a top player before you have learned how to scout and hold a sizable wealth of your own.

*This game requires patience. You start with only $2000 and that will not be enough money to build a house that will make you reasonably safe from other players. In order to build a decent house you need use your starting 2k to buy tools and rob richer players, in this process of trying your luck against the rich you will die (a lot), but you need to keep trying because eventually you will succeed. Then, after your success, it's time to stop dying and start seeing other players die in the deathtrap that you have built for them.

*This is a frustrating game and you need to be careful. Due to the permadeath mechanic you can lose everything that you have worked on due to one single wrong step. This rather harsh rule actually makes the game far more interesting and tense, it means that every time you defeat another player you get the knowledge that he has been completely ruined and additionally it means that you become afraid of your own house because every time you make a modification to it you are supposed to go into your own deathtrap and reach your safe in order to prove that what you have created is solvable, during these 'self-tests' you can die. You will feel in your own skin how this machine that you have created to kill other players can be extremely dangerous even to yourself.

*Your family is supposed to be a burden. Just like in real life, eh? In this game you play the role of the father of a stereotypical white american nuclear family in the 90's, you have the duty and responsibility of protecting them. Other players will try to kill your wife and kids because they are a weakness and killing them can make your home more vulnerable.

*The goal is just to stay alive. There are really no overarching goals in this game other than trying to survive and rising above other players in the charts. However, all homes eventually fall. Even if you make a house so good that it kills practically every burglar that enters it you still cannot avoid attracting the attention of the more skilled and well equipped thieves and once those guys set their sights on your home they will take you out... Unless you can take them out first, but for how long can you keep others from emerging?

If you can accept those things and if you refuse to rage quit you're going to realize that The Castle Doctrine might quite be the best multiplayer out there. Also: Visit the official forums, we have a nice community and it's fun to share your gameplay experiences there.

I'm a fan of difficult, tense games that don't try to hold your hand. Sadly, this isn't so much a difficult game as a discouraging game. Don't get me wrong, I like the premise a lot, and I enjoy the idea of playing this game with friends, trying to guess whose house belongs to who, with all of that kind of fun social dynamic attached when you finally penetrate a house's defenses. Sadly, playing the game as presented on the public server is an exercise in pointlessness.

To begin with, the game has extremely far beyond frustrating game flow that actively discourages experimentation to a degree I can't really explain very well using words. Despite really wanting to like the game, I was done after the second day of ownership. Experimentation of any type, with your own house's design or with exploring those of others, is 'rewarded' by completely losing the house's entire design if you make any mistakes whatsoever anywhere, either in its wiring or in negotiating the house's solution. Despite well-matching the game's design philosophy, the fundamental reality of this situation is that you will spend over 95% of your game time rebuilding nearly identical houses with the almost no money you're forced to start with.

The ease of death is really overstated, it's very easy to avoid dying provided no one with an entire inventory full of guns and saws really wants your money. That said, after rebuilding the same house for the fourth time, I lost pretty much all desire to look at anyone else's houses. And, of course, if you make a mistake wiring your own house and end up in your own trap, well. It's time to start over. Unlike a 'roguelike', instead of being able to pick the game up immediately when you die and try again doing something fun like exploring an unknown cavern and collecting loot or what have you, you're forced to rebuild your entire house once again from literally nothing. If this review is starting to seem repetitive, that's because that's what the game is like.

In conclusion, one gets the feeling that the game was primarily designed for people who are unemployed, don't have kids, and probably can't be bothered to cook for themselves, or generally do any of the other things that people value their time for. Like writing reviews.

In the games current state, I would not recommend it. There is absolutely no help for you once you jump in the game, no tooltips or tutorials whatsoever. There is a user guide which was very helpful to me, but I don't think that people should have to rely on guides to figure out the basics of a game. It's all pretty much trial and error for noobies, and can be very overwhelming with all the different types of blocks and such, especially when you have no idea what any of them do. While trial and error is good and all, when it's the only way you have to learn the game's mechanics, it becomes quite tedious. I also think some of the games mechanics need to be reworked - such as dying in your own home. In order to finish booby-trapping your house, you have to reach your vault yourself, which I think makes perfect sense. However, if you die while testing out your defenses, you start over from scratch. Sure it makes sense, but I think the player should just simply be cut a break here. How are we supposed to know if a certain trap works if we can't test it ourselves? There's also a five minute rule. In which if you are inactive for five minutes, the game kills you off; this happens even if you are testing your own home. As far as I understand the developer is frequently updating the game so I'd advise waiting for a few patches to roll out before trying this game.

Edit: After playing a bit more of the game I'm starting to realize how broken it is. Rather than using clever traps that require the robber to think in order to break into the vault, I'm finding most people just use simple game-breaking tactics that make it pure luck if anyone succesfully robs you. An example of this that I've seen quite often is making columns with walls with a door at the end of each one, behind one door is their vault, behind every other is a pitbull ready to bite your face off. That is just one of many examples I've seen, which makes robbing other people's houses nearly impossible. This game is a great idea and I hope the developer can find a way to fix these issues, but until then this game is not worth your money.

Second edit: The game can certainly be fun, after doing some research on traps, tools, etc. via the wiki and understanding the game a bit more it became pretty addicting. I still would not recommend this game because robbing others houses is just simply too hard. There's many cheap tactics you can use and in most cases I find myself either stepping inside someone's house, turning around and leaving, or walking around a bit and end up dead with everything I worked for lost. The addicting/fun part of this game for me is building my house, then watching people attempt to run through it, while killing my family in the process. Robbing others is just way too risky, and about 99% of the time will end up getting you killed. As a lot of others have mentioned, there is also a huge level of unfairness depending on how much money you have. I think that as long as the people on the top of the list don't get themselves killed from robbing others, then they'll just stay at the top from people trying to rob them (you get a bounty reward when robbers die inside your house). These giant maze-like houses become literally impossible to break into after a certain point, when just one false step can end up being fatal; and with dozens of doors to choose from, it's pure luck if anyone were to ever succeed. Definitely could use some balancing - for starters I'd suggest raising the measly $2,000 starting cash; even an extra $500 would be enough to make a difference. Whether it be more money to defend your home, or buy tools to break into someone elses, or have more in your vault to attract robbers attention to get their bounty, or more money for them if they successfully rob you - the more money that goes around, the better. As long as it doesn't go to the rich scumbags, haha.

Feature requests: Due to how often you die in this game, it would be nice to have layout saves, which would be especially useful for the start of the game. There's not a whole lot you can do with the beginning $2,000, so once you find a starting layout that you like it'd be nice to not have to build it over and over again each time you die. It would be useful for the end-game as well, and maybe the developer didn't add it in because he didn't want people to use the same layout each time, but I know that a majority of people will find one they like and stick with it rather than going through the trouble of coming up with a new one, if the developer wants them to or not; so a layout feature would just make it less of a hassle.

Secondly, because of how hard it is already to rob peoples houses, I don't think that you should lose every item in your backpack if you make it out alive. Dropping the items to make room for their cash in the vault makes sense.

Third, improve the search at the menu. As of now you can only search by name, and the list is sorted by richest to poorest. Add some more filters, such as "people who robbed you" or "sort by poorest", even the option to search by money rather than name would be nice. Obviously the people with the most money will have the hardest houses to break into, so if you're starting out you could try breaking into some low/mid-tier houses instead.

Lastly, a hand tool when building your house. When making a mistake while building you have to flip through the different items/blocks/animals and re-place them where you want them. It would be much easier and speed up the process if I had a hand tool that allowed me to just pick stuff up and drop it somewhere else, which could then be doubled as a tool that let me select multiple items by dragging a box, and moving them all at once.

Good idea, deeply flawed execution. You are not given enough resources to protect your own meager safe, nor go out and rob someone else's.

I have a feeling only those who have been playing a long time have been able to experience the intricate trap building that should be accessible to every player in this game; and is in fact the primary allure of purchasing The Castle Doctrine in the first place. For new players, however, the game is simply a race to rip off someone else whose stash is as equally completely defenseless as yours.

For new players, this is not a thinking man's game. You don't spend your time solving puzzles and building. Instead, you leave your "castle" empty so you can attempt to rip off other new players, as they too cannot afford defenses. While you are out you're hoping you aren't ripped off from someone more powerful or equally desperate, so you can put together some funds. Improving your situation isn't possible in practice. You are barely even given enough money in the beginning to properly wall off an area, let alone build a simple logic trap, or electrified door. Needs balancing.