The Legend of Mala Tokmachka: a fortress of odds and ends, and a studio that refuses to pick a side

Let us start with what we will not do. This game borrows its name from a real place and sits within a contemporary geopolitical news story, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. That conflict is dramatic. We will say nothing more about it, and we will not comment on it here: it is neither our trade nor the right place.

Notably, the studio takes exactly the same position. It writes plainly that its game does not tell you who is right or who is wrong, and that it is about the strange mythology of endurance, about how a small defensive point becomes larger than life. The battlefield is in fact described as a nameless frontier village.

So let us talk about the game.

A fortress that grows upward

This is a two-dimensional tower defence doubled with a building game, where you construct your base block by block to turn a tiny outpost into a defensive machine.

The good idea is that the fortress is not a static tower. It is a living structure made of walls, weapons, support modules, power systems, radar, repair blocks and platforms. You expand upward, reinforce damaged sections, reposition your firepower, and above all decide which parts of the base are worth saving when the assault becomes unmanageable.

That last decision is what separates the game from an ordinary tower defence. It is not only about placing turrets, it is about accepting structural losses and choosing what to abandon.

Facing you, the pressure never stops: armoured vehicles and assault groups on the ground, aircraft from above, artillery, drones and missiles at range. You answer with machine guns, cannons, anti-air, lasers and missile platforms, thinking in overlapping fire zones rather than in accumulation.

The other half of the game

Between assaults, everything turns on spending. You repair walls, upgrade key weapons, add layers of defence or expand the base to unlock more firepower. Every decision arbitrates between immediate survival and long-term strength, and that is where the real depth sits.

It is also that progression layer, with its money, its experience and its upgrades, that makes you start again. You singled it out as your favourite element, and it is easy to see why: it is what turns a series of waves into something you built.

On the art direction, though, we remain torn, and evidently so are you. The studio claims a deliberately grim, industrial and absurd look, an odds-and-ends aesthetic where you end up erecting ridiculous structures that somehow keep standing. That choice has character, but it does not try to charm, and it will divide.

What we do not know yet

The game has no firm release date yet and no Steam reviews: this score comes from our own playthroughs. It rewards genuinely tactical vertical building and the decision, rare in this genre, to knowingly abandon parts of your own fortress. Good news, French is planned, and the language list is very broad, Ukrainian and Russian included.

The real unknown is the one facing every endless siege game: the curve. A game built on waves rising indefinitely has to find the point where difficulty becomes interesting rather than arbitrary, and where you lose because you built badly, not because the counter ticked over. Without that, the run becomes arithmetic.

And you, in a siege game, do you prefer the compact armoured fortress or the improvised tower that holds by miracle?

Impatient, sceptical, or both? The InsertCoins Discord exists for exactly that.