izigame.me

I've been following Age of Darkness for quite a while now; waiting to play it out until it was more polished and included more features. On the surface, this game is a kindred spirit to your warcraft/starcraft mods where you're tasked with surviving and clearing the map with scaling difficulty. Sprinkle in They Were Billions' horde mechanics, and you have this weirdly shaped game. There are currently three "factions" with varying play styles, each highlighting two differing heroes to play as. The ideas, graphics, and gameplay loops are quite addicting and show immense potential. However, even after having watched this game evolve over roughly 3 years, there are still some glaring issues that need addressing. This game requires - as expected - quite a bit of micro management and calculated expansion. However, the mechanics and pathfinding don't lend to this experience very well. Units will easily body block and clog tight junctions, which makes avoiding AOE attacks a bit frivolous unless you focus on range. Units are also incredibly slow, with negligible upgrades to improve this for the most part. There is no Calvary option, so quickly shifting from one end of the base to the other can be useless unless you know in advance the path the horde is going to take (which to my experience was difficult to predict even with watchtowers). Throwing in the randomness of each survival seed, with no current option to play hand crafted maps, and you can find varying difficulty with resource allocation.
Some of these points are rather nitpicky, however I list them as it leaves me curious as to what PlaySide Studios will focus on with the upcoming updates; given that the roadmap is a bit ambiguous. Multiplayer - especially up to 4-8 teams - would make this an insane experience to share with others and is a much requested feature. With this said, the base material is just too shallow to really make such an increase in scale functional. There aren't ways to customize your heroes, there aren't ways to customize units, most defenses have vertical improvements rather than gameplay altering opportunities, and there are only a handful of ways to build (successfully) tall rather than wide cities. I may be wrong on some of these assumptions, however this game didn't hook me in a way which made me want to investigate further which I find to be a true shame.
I tentatively recommend this title, as there aren't many RTS games like this out there anymore and this game has improved (depending on who you ask) over the years. It needs quite a bit more content to make the replayability a surefire option: whether it be different objective options sprinkled into survival which allow for differing endings (such as a big boss fight), deeper hero mechanics, other bases available to siege in between hordes, or just general combat improvements (such as transport units, flying units, Calvary, armories, or advancements which force the player to commit their upgrades to one such playstyle). There are smaller versions of these ideas included. Excluding the somewhat boring campaign which reminded me of a scaled down SpellForce 3, I do hope that this game expands appropriately.