[2024 Top Picks] The next Cookie Run is a combat game made for everyone

Cookie Run: Tower of Adventures, featuring 3-D graphics and polished mechanics, offers both solo and group play in a whimsical dessert-themed setting. It enters beta in January and is scheduled for release in the first half of 2024.

Devsisters’ Cookie Run: Tower of Adventures is scheduled for official release in the first half of 2024. [DEVSISTERS]

Looking for a casual mobile action game jam-packed with charming character designs, flashy battle mechanics and food puns? Then you’re in for a treat with Cookie Run: Tower of Adventures, scheduled for release in the first half of 2024, which will take you on a climb to the top of Pancake Tower.

It’s game developer Devsisters’ first Cookie Run title to feature 3-D graphics, which allow for a more vivid and immersive sense of adventure as users roam the map from a bird’s-eye point of view. Polished battle mechanics make for a smooth gameplay.

Users play as cookies with unique combative skillsets and are tasked with battling monsters and surpassing objects and puzzles, which change in every stage. While the game includes a solo adventure mode, players can fight bosses in groups of up to four.

The Cookie Run franchise is well known for the excellent design of its playable characters, whimsical dessert-themed settings and expansive lore. It's one of the rare cases in which a Korean developer has successfully managed to expand the IP and universe of its original game. Cookie Run: Oven Break, the first in the series, launched in 2013.

Cherry Cookie, for instance, is a Red Riding Hood-inspired, cherry bomb-popping prankster akin to a Harley Quinn let loose in Willy Wonka’s factory. Gun-slinging Rye Cookie, decked in wild west wear, drinks “rye juice” — which one can only assume is a PG version of beer — and shoots from a “wholegrain-caliber.”

But while Cookie Run is a combat game, there's no gore or R-rated lore to be found (apart from maybe some “strawberry jam blood”). The game is meant to be played by all audiences, and is developed to encourage collaboration. Game head developer Bae Hyung-ook said he created the game with a “fond childhood memory” of visiting the arcade with family and friends to play games together. The game is thus designed so that players even of different levels can collaborate to defeat stronger opponents.

The closed beta test for Cookie Run: Tower of Adventures runs from Jan. 19 to Feb. 4. Applications to enter end on Jan. 17.

BY KIM JU-YEON [kim.juyeon2@joongang.co.kr]