Castle Warriors

Hero's Hour reminiscent handsome fantasy sprites meets Tug of War a la Warpips or old Flash games. It's great, lost two rounds fairly early then went all the way third round. Really enjoying it so far, the RNG of new unit cards can keep you on the edge of your seat a bit and it looks like there are lots of unlocks and levels to go.
Oh, I forgot my only note is that immediately being able to click a selection of unit when the screen appears without any fanfare or delay is occasionally frustrating. Maybe stop mouse input for .5 seconds, or have very short fanfare first (some people may disagree with me here and like it doesn't stop the flow at all).

Fun and simple autobattler similar to some of the maps you'd find on Starcraft 2 custom games. Games are pretty quick which makes the game very digestible if you don't have much time to play. Also there's very minimal input which makes the game very idle.

It's still pretty early in development, but I already feel like i got my money's worth.
(Edit 30 hours later) This game is my GOTY 2023 so far, the most pleasant surprise for a cheap game I've had since Vampire Survivors.

Great fun and easy to play. Lots of variation in units already in the game, and excited to see what other kinds of units they add. Easily worth the low price tag too!

Game is great for what it is. So far the QoL features just arent here yet, but what are you gonna do? It's early access. Optional damage numbers would be nice instead of total damage in the army menu. Also the ability to choose which units you can get in your army would be nice as some of the unlocked units are complete trash.
Edited my previous review since the Dev fixed the immortal dragon on Stage 6 and is very quick to respond to tickets and player feedback. Looking forward to playing more.

For the price, this is a fun little auto-battler, especially since the foundation is fantastic.
CASTLE WARRIORS throws you into a battlefield where your goal is to turn your little army into a bigger army, and tip the balance of power in your favor by frequently selecting the units that you'd like to field. Aside from occasionally using your ability, this is really all you'll be doing. This is fine, though, since the visuals allows for you to constantly send dozens of units to attack the enemy fortress, making for a fun time if you just want to unwind with a game that doesn't demand a whole lot of input on your part.
I do have criticisms, though.
* MORE FEEDBACK - The game sports a lot of units who each have their own specific role on the field. Some have high damage, but low HP. Some have high HP, but low damage. Some units can only attack ground enemies, some can only attack air enemies. Some units provide damage resist or damage buffs. However, there's really no way to know how each of these abilities are tangibly benefiting you during the battle. Your UI will *only* show unit damage and nothing else.
I'd love it if we had a more robust readout of what was going on down on the battlefield. How much damage resist is on the field? How much is our damage being buffed? How much are the tanky units tanking? Even average lifespan on the field would be cool. Where are the damage numbers? When are spells being triggered? Where are the auras? What does the enemy's army look like? What units are they favoring and how can I counter that? More of everything would be amazing, since "Total Damage" for every unit doesn't tell me a whole lot. But that leads into my next point.
* BALANCE - Since Rogues were doing the most Total Damage on the field by far during my games, I decided to see what would happen if I *only* picked Rogues, only selecting other 1-star units if Rogues didn't show up during selection. After fielding 25 Rogues, I ended up winning without much hassle. (EDIT: After the most recent update, being able to swarm the enemy with Rogues is no longer possible. They get rocked by the towers. Very nice change by the devs!) I think this shows that the game currently favors pure damage output at the moment, and is not tuned to force the player to build more defensive, supportive, or tanky units. This would, of course, be difficult to implement currently as there is no real feedback on what is going on during the battle. After a certain point, there are so many units on screen that all we can react to is the Total Damage our army is doing. We cannot see any other stat, or how auras are affecting our units (is it a map-wide aura or more local?) and so building damage is all we can really do.
* RANDOMNESS - There are basically three things you're doing at any given time. Selecting one of three randomly-provided units after each level; using your ability after cooldown (this rarely affects the flow of battle); and occasionally clicking a roulette that will randomly upgrade a unit type in your army. Combined with the Rogue shenanigans above, it really feels to me like I simply don't have enough influence on the battle. Being able to even tell your army to focus particular units or set behaviors would be neat; my army will sometimes ignore units attacking the castle in favor of moving further down field, or ignore bosses to attack towers, or ignore enemy towers to attack the main castle (I feel like the castle shouldn't be attackable until all towers are down). Even if it's a temporary thing, being able to engage with the battle in more ways would make the experience more fun. Especially since battles have a habit of lasting 15 to 20 minutes. That's a lot of time to be content with clicking one button every so often. The randomness of unit select and the roulette wheel upgrades just do not feel satisfying after a while. At the moment, it's just too hands-off.
I read that there was a way to manually select units at one point. That sounds much more enjoyable. (And if you're going to keep the roulette wheel, please shorten the amount of time it takes to land on a unit. 10 real seconds is a long time.) (EDIT: The devs have added a skip button for the roulette wheel! Yay!)
OVERALL: I wanted to provide a lot of notes here because this is such an interesting game. I keep coming back to it and am really interested to see how it changes from here. I love the feeling of overwhelming the enemy with such a massive army. I LOVE the unit diversity and the charming pixel art. And I love the IDEA of my choices affecting the flow of battle, but the game needs a bit of tweaking on that front. Still, I'm gonna keep playing. CASTLE WARRIORS is a great time, especially for the modest price the devs are asking for during EA.

Pretty fun game, but have ran into multiple game breaking bugs.
-- Constantly having unit selection screens pop up without any units to choose, and have to reset the game to fix it, losing all of my progress in the round.
--Winning the game and clicking the main menu button often crashed the whole game.
Apart from the two bugs I have been experiencing, its a decent game, worth the $2. Would recommend once they fix some of the breaking issues, if they continue developing.