Age of Darkness: Final Stand Review (Dire)
Have been looking forward to this for a long time. Pretty disappointed, to be honest.
They are Billions was ... fine-ish. Shitty campaign, and the survival was just lacking replayability. No actual progression outside of it, which can be either good or bad, depending on your point of view. But I'd love to have an actual "rogue"-lite mode where I can level up heroes, gain advantages, unlock new tech, etc. In addition to the classic survival mode that is all just about survival.
Speaking of which: It's basically the same as They are Billions, which is a huge shame. With the addition of 6 unique hero units, there's not much to it. You have some basic and TWO advanced units and that's it from what I can see, unless there's a "hidden tech tree". Siege weapons seem to be the name of the game. I died on death night 3 on my first attempt. The gameplay is more involved, though, with you having to go out during the day to clear out enemies to gain experience, resolve, and just expand. This is fine ... mostly.
The combat itself is ... problematic. At least in the campaign the units behave terribly. In the one survival game I've played, things seemed a bit better, and everything was somehow way more fluid. Which is good. It's never going to be a good RTS, though. Units are floaty, and push each other around, path finding is bad, sometimes units just refuse to attack a target for some reason, other times they randomly SWITCH targets, thus taking MORE damage from enemies, instead of just killing one. I assume this might be a coding issue, wherein the units are instructed to "spread" their attacks to avoid 10 archers all firing on the same target, i.e. overkilling it by a large margin. That works when you have a big army. It doesn't work when you only have 1 or 2 units ...
Graphics are okay, but as is now tradition for UE5 games, they're just terribly programmed. The game is laggy, stuttery for no reason, and in later nights FPS go down by quite a margin, despite the game not actually looking very impressive. Think: Age of Empires 2 HD, but with 3D graphics. Not that you'd notice it. Zooming in the game has extremely blurry textures at times, and ground textures are odd. I'm not the only one noticing that. The devs know about it, but seemingly have not deigned to fix that in 2 years time.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1426450/discussions/1/4038106081468930875/#c4038106323495120309
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1426450/discussions/1/3820783808420499111/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AgeOfDarknessGame/comments/1ck5s61/help_games_textures_and_shadows_look_very_bad/
These are some examples. Luckily, in survival mode you will be way too busy to notice anymore. The management portion of my brain took over.
Lastly, the campaign ... it's ... there. So far I'm wholly unimpressed. The first few missions have you fighting bandits. I kid you not. The story is lackluster, the characters bland, the voice acting ... is a choice. I'm not sure why the game wastes 4 prologue missions on this drivel. Supposedly, there are 3 factions in the game, though all seem to get access to the exact same units and upgrades, the only difference being their heroes and some stat allocations, maybe. In any case, they could've created a big map for the tutorial to take place and then just move from place to place, instead of making each its own map...
For how long this game has been in Early Access I'm not really impressed. It's They are Billions in a fantasy setting with a BIT more RTS stuff. Otherwise it is EXACTLY the same. Build houses to generate money, build farms to generate people, build lumber mills and quarries to generate wood and stone. That's your economy. The rest is upgrading your military and economy. It's lacking in terms of variety, making every survival game pretty much the same, except for the different heroes. All in all, I think I'll get my money's worth out of it, but I can't really recommend it. Not for the actual price, and not for the reduced one right now. There's probably a reason they've reduced the game by SIXTY FIVE percent AT LAUNCH ... before having to contend with the flood of negative reviews that's already starting to show itself. Grab a bit of money, while you call this version 1.0, then abandon it, and probably just create a new studio...