“Medieval Tower Defense and Real-time Strategy hybrid where positioning, gold farming and tower capturing decide the outcome against waves of legions and dragons.” – Steam Description

Open the Gate: Just a Little is an adorable pixel art tower defense game. You are king of the castle on the left and that dang dirty royalty is the castle on the right. We can’t have that, you have to duke it out in the middle of the bridge as you advance towards their castle. The game is made by an artist and developer duo and first hit Itch.io in March 2026. Their first demo hit steam in April, and now in August they have released onto Steam as a full release game.

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Tower “Defense”

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In a traditional tower defense game, you place your towers and well… defend. You sit and wait for the enemies to come to you. This game says “the best defense is a good offense” and lets you go find the enemy castle instead. You gain gold passively and can level up your castle each battle to a certain cap. Leveling up your castle gives you an increase to your troop count, at first it’s +1 troop but there are upgrades you can get to change this. In addition to increased headcount, you get faster gold generation which will cycle back into leveling up faster, or recruiting troops faster. Each troop has a cooldown when you recruit them so if the basic soldier costs 10 gold and you have 50 gold, you can’t quickly spam out 5 soldiers. There is a little bit of strategic planning in the gameplay which is a welcome change to the tower defense genre and unexpected from a game that presents essentially a Hatfields vs. McCoy’s combat stage.

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Recruitment Campaign

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Every time you enter into a battle, you will get the opportunity to recruit the boss enemy. The boss enemy can have 1 random title, and every time you challenge that boss they pull from a pool of random titles. Each title has different weights on the stats but the title’s weight is the same across all units that share that title. During my playthrough, I used the Wild title the most. Wild lowered my units maximum health but jumped up their attack strength a great deal. I just had to win with overwhelming force, a Shock and Awe tactic you might say. I redid battles until I had wild for every one of my units because I thought it was so funny.

Every time you complete a new battle, you can get XP as a reward. XP in this case is the name of the metaprogression currency that you use in the upgrade tree. This can be things that affect your units, your castle, or your abilities as the player. You can unlock new skills to use like the Arrow Rain that you start with, you can unlock a boulder, or a way to resurrect your troops. For your units, there are upgrades that affect their maximum health, attack speed, or attack damage. For your castle, you can get things like Castle Health, or Capture the Flag speed (which help capture mini castles at midpoints in the level), or just percentage gold generation for buying troops.

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One Army to Rule Them All

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As you progress in the game, there gets to be a lot on the screen. You fight you way through the four different legions: Crusader, Orc, Undead, and Dynasty. They each have their own armies, special skill, and even a dragon to face as a boss fight of sorts. Their units add new flavor to spice up the fights which is exciting to see, and more importantly you can recruit their units. By the end of your time with the game, you can have quite the melting pot of units.

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• Graphics– Really cute art style, the basic knight reminds me of Brackey’s knight model in a few of his game development videos. I fully realize that not everyone would know who that is or what I’m talking about, but just know that it’s a cute simple style.
• Gameplay– Gameplay is interesting deciding where to set your troops in formation, when to level up for increased troop cap, and when to save for stronger units. However it’s held back by the grind, you have to go back and farm certain battles that give 1XP per to get the upgrades in the tree that are 3+ XP each in order to be strong enough to progress.
• Sound– Sound design is good, the highlight here is the little voice lines the units have. They are endearingly chipmunk.
• Controls– Controls are not particularly explained. There’s a lot of utility like drag selecting from the action bar instead of on the screen, hotkeys to move characters around, to switch formations, etc. While I’m sure the developer designed controls that make sense in a RTS/Tower Defense hybrid, I wish there was a tutorial that explained them. They mentioned working on a tutorial system on their itch page back in may, so it’s possible it’s still in the works.
• Story– No story to speak of, like I said earlier, there are the 4 legions that you progress through. However, you kinda just make your own headcanon for why you’re the best King in the land.